Collage shortcuts

This collage is the result of a complete change when it was almost completed. I was interested in the griping gesture which originally concerned some food. My first attempt was with the Tokyo setting and the overacting of young girls I often witness in the streets of Geneva. To my discharge, I must admit that I am entering the 70ies tomorrow, so that may explain my conservative views on that kind of behavior.

When I looked on the picture, I found rather flat from a spatial point of view and formally quite uninteresting. I decided to destroy it while keeping the grasping girl. Trying different settings, and glued the headless man against the girl. The idea of a man grasping for the girl changed her gesture into one of despair – I got my plot! Rummaging through my magazine pile, I finally fell upon the candid photo of some Belgian brothel. All I had to do was to fix the girl properly on the naked body which I did by cutting away her dress.

I rarely discard any of my collages; I mostly try to push them further with important modifications. But this time, the change was radical. What seems interesting to me is that the “theme” or “subject” of the picture doesn’t appear at once. In the beginning, it’s playing around with possibilities. And it’s through this process the idea crystallizes – and once it’s there, the rest seems easy. But in the years after art school, this crystallization didn’t occur and I experienced depressive feelings of absolute failure. To overcome this, one needs success, for sure, and one can build up this feeling by writing on one’s work and by deciding to change direction when the wheels risk to get stuck.

This collage has made a huge impression to me. In fact, it made me halt. Why? Because I felt that it is very important in my collage flow.
Starting with the idea of an angel, it rapidly turned into a philosophical or theological picture. Here are some cues for understanding it.
An inscription: toujours ave – with a truncated e , and a cut off c = toujours ave/ toujours avec.
A Koran held open, the left thumb erasing the text.
A profile that makes me think of bar-mitzvah, where the boy is meant to read the torah.
A crowd in the background, flowing against a wall. This photo comes from the panic in Duisburg’s Love Parade 2010.
How do these elements come together, make sense?
The first idea I had was that the word had been taken off the boys’ mouth, or that the Koran is substituted to the Torah. The white spot means that it can’t be the ultimate truth because it is fragmentary or misinterpreted. But the erasure is also a sacrilege, an attempt to go back to the white page. I don’t know if the text is necessary.
The boy seems to be looking inwards; he doesn’t care about the mob, neither about the book. His head glows like his … (wing?). Does it mean that he is chosen? Is he the one who knows? Is he the messenger?
Many questions are left open. I hope that someone will comment here.

PS You can see a larger picture at Saatchi's:

This collage in order to show some decisions I took during the elaboration. It started with a rather uninspiring picture of a woman with her baby and the red lips glued between both heads, joining them in an ape-like figure. But the collage isn’t there.

The scalp on the top blurs the profiles underneath and the new arm gives a better dynamic.

The other arm “holds” the composition. Much better. But still…
The colored fragment makes a good contrast with the black&white picture and a pyramidal shape. But the picture lacks expression. I have to change it radically or I’ll be stuck.

Now the picture looks much stronger, but I hesitate: Is the embrace strong enough? Not really. I like the movement from the brown trousers to the smile and hesitate sacrificing it to a stronger expression – a clasp. But I have to put more steroids into the picture, I cannot leave like this. Allez!

Finally! The initial idea – a hug - is present from the beginning to the final picture, starting with a kind of childish “joke” (the red lips) or iconoclast gesture one can often see on billboards and going through a process choices: “Do I stop now or not?” “How can I can go further but keep the best parts of the picture?” And the answer is always: “You must sacrifice the part you like in order to be free to progress”. It means to me that I mustn’t be afraid of making fundamental changes in the picture.

There are two dangers waiting for the collage maker – stopping too early or overdoing it. My problem has always been my tendency to quit my work when it wasn’t yet accomplished. In these late years of mine, I got a better discipline, reinforced by my teaching experience, where I “push” my students a lot.

To a friend asking me how I felt now, I replied: mortal!
Till my operation, I had never really thought of being so vulnerable – accidents happening to others. The same has been true for my mother of whom I don’t remember any serious illness or accident till her 90ies. My father had a heart attack in his 50ies, stopped smoking cigars and went happily on till his 70ies, when his mind got confused. And I am heading to my 70th anniversary.
It occurs that I have been working on a collage that is strongly linked to this theme. It started quite simply with a picture showing to young ladies. The frontality of the figures changed radically when I stuck the fragment of a face on the right figure.

The body movement became contradictory, an oscillation between front and rear – an effect I cherish because I want the picture to move. The left figure than got another torso, creating a forward draught opposed to the right receding figure. At this stage, the collage looked quite incomplete, but the main element was there.

I then worked on the left head, thinking of an embrace

– but, who is hugged? The old man? Or is he leaving the young one? And if it is so, then where is he going? I don’t know the answer and this ignorance is the proof of the collage magic which goes its own ways, by the means of its con-junctions of fragments (I feel that I put more of them into my pictures), telling me a story about ageing, love and future separations.