Belén Segu’s fuzzy still life scenes are like flea market fever dreams

Belén Segu found her dreamy, surreal style of image making somewhere in between her layers on Photoshop. Approaching the tool as a way to uncover the endless possibilities for “distorting and manipulating” a singular image, the Chilean visual artist has been following what she refers to as an “erratic process – endless filters, brushes, effects, dislocations, and layers upon layers upon layers” forming new images out of old ones.

The artist has always been fond of collecting imagery, carefully compiling her own archives of found things. “At some point, I realised they all shared a common factor: objects, porcelain figures, jewelry, furniture, desserts – all of them referring to a certain past era,” she says. That’s why a lot of her pieces make you feel like you’re staring into some kind of surreal flea market feverdream. Many of these fuzzy objects are things the artist “cannot possess”, leaving her with only the possibility of archiving and collecting them in image form.

With this precious source imagery Belén sets out to replicate, distort and “stretch pixels until they burst”, working until a completely different picture appears: “a new, hybrid image, made with a mixed technique — a technique that I don’t even really know myself”, she says. This explains why each of Belén’s illustrations are made completely differently. Some of her works are of things that she might have painted partly, some are interpretations of objects she found on eBay and reimaged as something else entirely. “Perhaps I took a chair from eBay and transformed it by merging it with the head of a dog that wears a pearl necklace,” she says.

Whichever way her process decides to take shape, the artist’s aim is to collate somewhat of a “grotesque photomontage” that will later be “softened and unified, as if everything had always been together”, she shares. This heavily edited multilayered approach results in endlessly fascinating enigmatic pieces that withhold the magic of their making. “Perhaps that very procedure is what builds a particular, strange, and dreamlike style,” Belén ends.