René Alink is a collagist, photographer, artist, and joiner based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, in the south of the Netherlands. At 62, he has spent the past 25 years working as a joiner, following a previous career as a nurse in a hospital for psychiatric patients.
He has been creating collages for about four years, but his fascination with the past—particularly vintage images—has been present since childhood when as a young boy, he would cut pictures from magazines and paste them on his bedroom walls. To him, those images and the sense of romance and nostalgia they conveyed, represented a world where everything and everyone seemed happy and good—a beautiful fantasy in the mind of a troubled child, as he stated.
Now, as an artist, he still recognizes that romantic quality in his collages but also enjoys “stirring the soup” with a certain humor and absurdity. He creates exclusively analog collages. He appreciates the hands-on process of searching for the right images, cutting them out, and building unexpected associations through composition.
Check out his IG, @renealink_collage, for more!
