Meet Ronald McDonald Trump and Other Celebrity Portrait Hijacks

Graphic designer Kalle Mattsson also brings us Mussolindsey Lohan and Muhammad Dalí.

by Gabrielle Bruney

February 6, 2016, 8:00pm

Images courtesy the artist

"It starts with the name,” says Kalle Mattsson of his portrait mashup series Buffalo Bill Gates. “Faces are always possible to meld together, one way or another, but names rarely overlap.” And for any fan of puns, these names—Ronald McDonald Trump, Muhammad Dalí, Mussolindsay Lohan—are just delicious. What’s even more remarkable is that the graphic designer melds the faces of these celebrities, politicians, historical figures, and pop-culture icons in ways that are often fought with implications.

You'd never imagine that Taylor Swift's face could perfectly merge with 50 Cent's, but Mattsson uses his skills and our brains' natural quirks to make the mashups work. "Our brains are also hard wired to recognize, or even compose, faces, so that is a way easier task which I can have a lot of freedom with. That’s also the reason why I most of the time keep the faces divided with a clear cut, instead of making boringly perfect Photoshopped thing of it,” he tells The Creators Project. "Your brain jumps over that edge like it wasn’t there, and while doing so you finish the image in your head, using your primal reflex to recognise and interpret faces.”

Many of his portraits have political undertones. Mattsson says he tries to imbue them with such meaning “whenever possible,” but that, "Since I can’t really make any two names fit, if they don’t by themselves already, I see it more as a matter of finding combinations than making them."

"But sometimes there really is gold in the combinations and then I go for those, like Mickey Maozedong, which is such a crazy combination of capitalism and communism. Or Christopher Columbusama Bin Laden, who both came to North America in a way up to no good. Or Ronald McDonald Trump, which is almost too spot on to be a coincidence."

"I do choose carefully which combinations a put out there, since everything does have a message, especially when you are using people that represent a lot of ideas and values,” says Mattsson. "The main underlying political message comes from me putting ALL people in the same bucket, and carefully pick them up, two and two, as a reminder that we’re all in the same boat, doing the same silly things, on this one little planet of ours."