CECIL TOUCHON

Artist Statment
I am exploring the boundaries between art and poetry in these intimate papiers colles composed of bits of lettering and the empty spaces between them. Stripped of literary meaning, these works rely on composition, rhythm and visual movement to convey their meaning, which is ambiguous and intuitive. These works are constructed from distressed street posters and bill boards that have been carefully edited into inlayed bits of printed matter creating passages that move from figure to ground and then reverse back to figure through gentle curves, irregular grids and subtle shading techniques. Snippets of lettering almost become recognizable letters or perhaps proposals for a new poetic alphabet but always slip back into forms and spaces creating the possibility of enigmatic and open, simultaneously plausible interpretations.