Pepe Reyes is a collage artist born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1980, who treats every cut as a form of investigation: a way of taking an image apart to question its authority. At Art of NOMA his work takes the form of "rollage", a print-based technique of cutting and reassembling imagery that he develops through an ongoing collaboration with JoCa. Seven limited-edition rollage prints are currently available, each framed, numbered and priced at $500 USD.
Who Is Pepe Reyes, the Collage Artist From Monterrey?
Pepe Reyes was born in Monterrey, in northern Mexico, in 1980. His Pepe Reyes artist page at Art of NOMA describes a practice built entirely around collage, and it describes collage in an unusually precise way: not as a decorative pasting of pictures, but as a system of visual investigation in which each cut fragments both the material and its meaning.
That sentence is the key to everything else. For many artists, collage is a method of combination, a way of bringing unrelated things together. For Reyes it is first a method of separation. The scissors or the blade come before the glue. Before an image can be rebuilt, it has to be broken, and the breaking is where the thinking happens.
His biography frames this as a deliberate, systematic deconstruction of the original. Reyes appropriates pre-existing images and works on them until their authority is in question. The point is not to mock the source. It is to show that an image we take as whole and settled is, in fact, a construct, and a fragile one.
Why Does Reyes Treat Collage as a System?
The word that recurs in the gallery's description of his work is logic. Reyes works through what his page calls a rigorous geometric logic of repetitive patterns and rhythmic displacements. The fragments are not scattered. They are placed according to rules, repeated at intervals, and shifted by measured amounts, so that the final surface reads as a structure rather than a scatter.
This matters because it separates his work from the loose, intuitive collage that most people picture when they hear the word. A Reyes composition has the feel of a score or a grid. You can sense the system even if you cannot name it, and that sense of an underlying order is part of the pleasure of looking.
The biography describes the effect in a single phrase: Reyes breaks the static unity of the image to transform it into vibrant structures. A photograph or a painting, left alone, is static. It presents one view and asks you to accept it. Cut into strips and reassembled with rhythm, the same image starts to move. The eye travels along the repetitions and catches on the displacements, and the picture becomes something you read over time rather than take in at once.
Underneath the method is a proposition about the world. His page puts it plainly: reality is not a solid piece, but a sum of infinitely rearrangeable parts. That is a philosophical claim made with a blade. Each work demonstrates it by showing that a single image can be reorganised into something new without adding a single element from outside.
What Is Rollage, and How Is It Made?
The works available at Art of NOMA belong to a specific strand of his practice. The gallery's collection description calls it rollage: a print-based, cut-and-reassembled technique that Reyes develops through an ongoing collaboration with JoCa. Where a conventional collage might draw on magazines, posters or found photographs, rollage begins with a printed image that is then cut and rebuilt by hand.
The product pages describe the physical process in some detail. Each piece starts as a giclée print on William Turner Hahnemühle paper, a 190 gsm archival stock. That print is then folded and repeated so that the flat sheet takes on dimensional rhythm. The archival printing holds the tonal accuracy of the source, while the folding and reassembly set repetition against disruption.
The result sits somewhere between a print, a relief and a collage. It is reproducible in the sense that the source is a print, which is why these works are issued as limited editions. It is handmade in the sense that the cutting, folding and reassembly happen on each sheet. And it is a collage in the strict sense that Reyes gives the word: an original image taken apart and reorganised according to a system.
The description of the series says that it translates painting into a layered, fragmented register. That phrase points to the other half of the collaboration. The source imagery comes from JoCa, whose painted portraits already treat the face as something that fractures, dissolves and reassembles. Our profile of JoCa's non finito portraits and the fractured self explains that idea in depth. Rollage takes a painting built around the unfinished and subjects it to a second, more geometric kind of fragmentation.
Coded Titles That Point to Process, Not Subject
None of the seven works has a descriptive title. They are called TD2001, TD6B001, TD6A001, G1001, CD7001, CDTB001 and CDTA001. The collection page says these titles function as quiet codes rather than descriptions, and the product pages repeat the point: the coded title keeps the emphasis on structure, sequence and variation rather than on any depicted subject.
For a viewer used to evocative titles, this can feel austere at first. It is worth treating it as part of the work. A title like CD7001 refuses to tell you what the picture is about, and that refusal sends you back to the surface itself: the rhythm of the strips, the places where the pattern holds and the places where it slips. Our piece on what an artwork's title tells you, and what it doesn't is a useful companion here.
The codes also make the series legible as a series. The shared prefixes group the works into families, and the numbering suggests sequence. Hung together, two or three pieces read as variations on a single system, which is exactly what they are. Hung alone, a single work still carries the sense of belonging to a larger logic.
Seven Limited Editions Made With JoCa
As of October 12, 2026, all seven rollage prints are available at Art of NOMA, each priced at $500 USD. Every one is dated 2025, printed on William Turner Hahnemühle 190 gsm paper, and issued in a limited edition of five. Each is framed in black painted pine with an acrylic face and comes with a certificate of authenticity.
The formats are compact and close to square. The work pictured above, CD7001, measures 31 × 30 cm. CDTB001 and CDTA001 are both 30 × 30 cm; TD2001 is 30.5 × 31 cm; TD6A001 is 30 × 33 cm; TD6B001 is 28 × 33 cm; and G1001, the largest, is 37.5 × 30 cm. The product pages describe these sizes as made for close viewing, and that is the right way to hang them: at eye level, where the folds and strips can be read.
Because the base of each work is a print, the usual questions about editions apply. An edition of five means that at most five examples of each image exist, each numbered. If you are new to how that works, our guide to prints, editions and originals lays out the distinctions, and our explainer on what a certificate of authenticity really means covers the paperwork that accompanies each piece.
One point is worth stressing: rollage is not a reproduction of a painting. The print is the raw material, not the finished object. The cutting, folding and reassembly are done by hand on every sheet, which is why the gallery files these works among its limited-edition prints while describing them, accurately, as collage.
Why Small Framed Editions Suit a First Collection
Works like these solve several problems at once for a collector who is starting out. They are modest in size, so they fit an apartment wall, a study or a hallway without dominating the room. They arrive framed and ready to hang. They are priced at a level that allows a collector to buy more than one and to see how a pair or a trio behaves together.
They also carry two names. A Reyes rollage is a work by Pepe Reyes in its structure and method, and it carries JoCa's imagery in its source. For anyone following JoCa's painting, the JoCa collection at Art of NOMA shows the original register that rollage translates. For anyone drawn to geometry, pattern and the logic of the fragment, Reyes's own practice is the reason to look.
Finally, the works reward exactly the kind of looking that makes collecting satisfying. The system is visible but not obvious. The longer you spend with a piece, the more of its rhythm you find. To see Reyes alongside the gallery's other emerging artists, visit our artists page, or go straight to the Pepe Reyes collection to view all seven editions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Pepe Reyes?
Pepe Reyes is a collage artist born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1980. His work treats collage as a system of visual investigation, in which pre-existing images are cut apart and reorganised through a geometric logic of repetitive patterns and rhythmic displacements.
What is rollage?
Rollage is a print-based, cut-and-reassembled technique that Pepe Reyes develops in an ongoing collaboration with JoCa. A giclée print on archival Hahnemühle paper is folded, cut and repeated by hand so that the flat image gains dimensional rhythm.
Which Pepe Reyes works are available at Art of NOMA?
As of October 12, 2026, seven rollage prints are available: TD2001, TD6B001, TD6A001, G1001, CD7001, CDTB001 and CDTA001. Each is from 2025, issued in an edition of five, framed in black painted pine with an acrylic face, and priced at $500 USD.
Why do Pepe Reyes's works have coded titles?
According to the gallery's descriptions, the coded titles function as quiet codes rather than descriptions. They keep attention on structure, sequence and variation instead of on a depicted subject, and they make the works legible as a series.