From 20 September to 12 October 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
MR. DJUB
“I made my first collage in 1983. I was 14, I was a punk, I made fanzines. It was a time when all the layouts were made by hand… In France, the punk and Situationist legacy was already well established. Collage was therefore a natural practice, but used above all politically, in the spirit of the slogan. Collage has a fascinating history. Some trace it back to Charles Dufresny in the eighteenth century. For my part, I feel an emotional bond with the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, and of course with the Surrealists, particularly Max Ernst: that is the precise period I am most attached to. Then I like the way the Art Brut people moved things on by combining techniques, going from paper to objects to tell their own stories. Collage is more a shared practice than a movement as such; it is a reality. On the other hand, one state of mind binds collagists together: the Stakhanovism of the whole business. They are all scalpel fanatics who want to make a new meaning, a mischievous subversion, spring from foreign material. And the real point in all this is how far you are able to push the exercise. I also think one has to distinguish collagists from computer addicts and digital assemblage. I work only with newspapers published between 1840 and 1880, for the sake of consistency. One of the advantages of collage is precisely its lack of reference points. In that sense no dogma confines its practice, so it has no defined school, and I love that, as someone who claims to be self-taught, having been thrown out of the national education system at 16. Ernst said: ‘If it is the plumes that make the plumage, it is not the glue that makes the collage.’ In art, nothing can be reduced to a technique.”
Artist: Mr. Djub