Seven Sins I : base material (2022)

Evolving from alternative and experimental comics to post-comics, I have increasingly been making use of collage and montage techniques within proto- or infra-narrative publications, as is the case for Grid and Lamer, Lama China, Lamaree, Groeten uit het Avondland, Eclipticon, De kunst van het genieten, Winterdicht, Enjoy your ants at war, Ventilator and more recently La Spirale. These combinational and 'conflictual' techniques apply on words and images and tend to unlock connotations and narrativity or discourse that can be associated with the chosen material (e.g., newspaper photographs), as is commonly the case within modern and postmodern montage. (See for introduction my chapter on montage in comics and historical avant-gardes in my doctoral dissertation.) In 2022, I tried to prolong this way of working to 'autonomous' or at least non-sequential images: I would start from found material which I would treat graphically to combine diverse elements into new pictures. Here again, nothing new, seen this well-established tradition: for about a century, montage and collage have been often used artistic methods, e.g., in cubism, surrealism, pop art and so on.

            Mind that in my experience, it is always an encountered element that 'finds' me rather than that I find it, meaning that I can be 'grasped' by a detail, a stain, a shade etcetera within any kind of visual context, prints especially. (I rarely go 'looking for' this or that kind of elements as is the case within artistic documentation.) This recurrent phenomenon is known to most people, I suppose, artists in the first place: it is close to but not concurrent with and rather prior to pareidolia or 'seeing things in stuff'. I am functioning on a level where graphic elements would seize my attention and possibly be of interest for combinational work, not as much for a possible meaning (as e.g., in surrealism) or interesting shape or form (as in more formalist veins), but for reasons of simple 'attractiveness', or in other cases because they arouse the intuition that they could 'fit' or be useful in my current workflow. Mind also that being 'seen' by something doesn't necessarily imply psychosis (structurally speaking) since being 'caught' by elements within the gaze are recurrent - and in the case of neurosis, punctual - moments whereupon one is being struck by a meaningless real within the same gaze wherein the subject 'resides'. Of course, one can find out what these found signifiers 'represent' for/in one's own subjectivity: each of these elements quickly become an 'emblem' for this or that aspect of 'yourself', that moment of your personal history, that feature of your sensitivity and so on. And in most cases, I would know, but working with that graphic matter supposes to keep this 'knowledge' to one's own, as they say, and to keep on looking at it as something 'real', i.e., there as such, nonetheless ready at every moment to become something 'meaningful' or even 'symbolic' but also ready to disappear into nothingness, sheer insignificance. Keeping these elements that 'catch my eye' (e.g., a typographic thingy in a magazine) allows me to explore them graphically by partially redrawing them and/or combine them by copying and pasting - see the images underneath (all originally on A4 paper, mixed media: print, ink, graphite, charcoal, etcetera).

Seven Sins II: charcoal montages

Academic research & education