ON COLLAGE

Collage
is a very fast medium, I love it for that. Il love it too for the fact that it uses worthless material, sort of rubbish, and that it goes back to a tradition of combat. 

When I discovered the technique of collage I was bewondered and so it is ever now. It opens to a world of possibilities far bigger than if I only painted my own fantasy. And the link with reality seems closer to me, even if it's a reproduced reality. Because I want to communicate with the onlooker. But not by painting like an old master. I want to be of my time. And  modern art displays the "infidelity" to tradition and reality. 

I call my works mutations or grafts because I want to realise impossible transplantations in a different way than the cubists, dadaists and surrealists. I focalize on the borders between the pieces in order to obtain a real graft. For me it's like my brain is working, trying to make sense out of all  impressions, souvenirs, sensations ...

If people think that collage consists in just putting things together that have nothing in common, to me it's different. It's like trying to reassemble the disparate pieces of a whole that has been broken and where you miss the manual. The result can be a bit frightening, I agree, but through these edges I have the place to think and to feel, I have freedom. And I think that art that pleases too easily,  lies. And the fact that the grafts are visible (instead of smoothening the picture) shows the fracture and in the same time the healing since the whole functions as a coherent picture. Furthermore I estimate that a work of art has not to please immediately, but to startle the onlooker, to fascinate him. 

One aspect is the fact that my collages generally  don't have one center, but several and that the eye has to oscillate between different fragments. It means that there is uncertainty about the subject of the collage  in contrast to many visual works which try to affirm one message. I feel that in this aspect of my works lies their modernity.

But still, to me collage is continuing painting by other means. 

This year (2010) I discovered the magic of digital printing on canvas which permits me to enlarge my collages from A4 to much bigger sizes (after somme pp work on my computer) , a possibility I was dreaming of since the intensification of my collage work in 1999.

 As for my work itself, I always say to myself: make it stronger, more powerful.

The collages are displayed in section collage: collage

A very complete and interesting analysis of collage with examples of my works can be found here: course on collage