Love Birds by Diogo Landô
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Mix-media on Glass Brick
Dimensions: 20 x 20 cm
Edition production year: 2026
Edition of 14
Price: $498.00 USD
Status: available
Love Birds Mixed Media Glass Brick 20 × 20 × 8 cm Edition: 1 of 14 unique/original pieces Number: #1 This artwork is created using mixed media applied within a glass brick, combining collage, photographic imagery, paint, and graphic elements. The transparent structure introduces depth and light as active components, allowing the layered composition to shift subtly according to the viewer’s position and the surrounding environment. Love Birds presents a bold, emotionally charged image where a bright, dripping smiley face overlays a heart-like form, surrounded by flowers, birds in flight, and fragments of symbolic and urban imagery. The smile operates as a familiar visual language of happiness and immediacy, while the surrounding elements suggest intimacy, fragility, and connection. The birds act as gentle interruptions—symbols of freedom, movement, and fleeting moments within a dense emotional field. The work explores love as something joyful yet complex, often filtered through idealised symbols and visual shortcuts. The glass brick functions as a veil, softening and containing the image while keeping it slightly out of reach. Love Birds reflects on how affection, optimism, and desire are constructed and displayed, suggesting that behind bright icons and romantic gestures lies a layered emotional reality—tender, imperfect, and deeply human.
Why collect this work?
A blunt yellow smiley is laid over a dense red collage, turning happiness into a graphic filter that partly conceals the more complicated imagery beneath it.
- The artist profile links Landô’s practice to design, photography and digital collage. That background clarifies the work’s collision of instant graphic recognition with fragmented photographic and historical imagery.
- In the photograph, the smiley’s thick circle and heart-shaped eyes dominate a red organic form, flowers, hummingbirds and engraved Cupid figures. Its drips weaken the icon’s apparent certainty, suggesting that cheerfulness is applied rather than fully secure.
- Catalogue metadata identifies mixed media within a glass brick, measuring 20 by 20 by 8 centimetres. This format can separate overlapping elements across a shallow depth and make illumination part of their legibility, though the single frontal photograph cannot demonstrate those shifts.
- The work is particularly useful for considering how contemporary emoji-like shorthand absorbs older conventions of romance, from Cupid to flowers and paired birds. Their compression into one compact object makes affection appear both culturally inherited and commercially legible.
About the Artist
Diogo Landô
Diogo Landô is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: mixed-media. Based in Oliveira de Azeméis.
Nationality: Portuguese
My work begins with emotion! An impulse born from a continuous need to create.
