John Baldessari is a famous Californian conceptual artist who often works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with coloured dots – all force the audience to ask how and what the image means. Balderassi started to use text in his paintings. It made him realize that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages. Typically, he collages together apparent unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result is to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages. When attempting Baldessari’s
