Matisse + Rothko + Boccioni
Picasso + Gris + Schwitters
Matisse + Kahlo + Klimt
The whole is more than the sum of its parts
Modern art history considers the pair Braque and Picasso as the founding fathers of the collage technique. In fact, in some works in the beginning of the XX century these two artists, by then involved within the production of cubism, glued clippings of periodicals and small objects directly on the canvas. The novelty of the gesture was due to two aspects, soon to have enormous consequences in art production. The collage introduced an effect of accumulation and contiguity, whose understanding depends on the gestalt effect, that is, where the Whole is superior than the simple sum of his parts. The abstractionism, the surrealism and the language games would later born of this clarification.
The other innovation, more radical for artistic practice, is derived from the fact of the use of pre-existing elements, that is, not created by the artist, but recovered, appropriated, by him. In this sense, Duchamp’s ready-made is already contained in the cubist collages.
Therefore, the apparently simple gesture of the collage introduces two fundamental questions for modern and contemporary art: in the mechanism of the gestalt, in which art is not anymore concerned with the recognition of the part, as in the figurative representation for example, being on the other hand dedicated to the emergence of the Whole; and in the paradigm shift, with the surpassing of an artisan and manual art, to become concept and context.
The novelty of my collages resides in a technological and theoretical deepening of the original gesture. In the practical plan with a radical appropriation, since all the images, without exception, are recuperate from the Internet and are assumed as photographs without camera. On the other hand, the collage is not based on contiguities, but on layers.
Digital images in the monitors constitute a true revolution in perception. Since, in contrast of that we are familiarized, the production of an image does not drift on the color accumulation, but rather on the decay of the black.
While in a typographical impression the colors are made by the accumulation of four inks, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, in the RGB system, used for the monitors, the colors derive from the gray gradations of three channels, Red, Green and Blue. The collage of images in the three different channels, are not an accumulation of inks, but an interaction between images. The color does not depend on a simple accumulation of inks, but on a process of adding and subtracting levels of gray.
This process of adding and subtracting is present in practically all life mechanisms, namely on natural collective systems, and biological networks where phenomenon like self-organization relies on simple mechanisms of positive and negative feedback.
To start with the interaction of life and dead, which appears as a metaphor for these series of dynamic and vertical collages in a RGB environment.
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