The process of creating a collage is much like puzzling out the pieces of life. Instead of creating things from scratch, collage artists are able to revitalize fragments into new energies. These new energies define the vision of the artist, where at times they limit the final framework, and at times, they accentuate it with its preceding context and style.
As much as I respect painters who can physically create something of out nothing; I have a stronger feeling for collage artists. They revisit different sources, select visuals applicable to their expressions, and, at the same time, they infuse the perceptions and potentials that were once embedded in the cutouts onto their new compressed plane.
Showcasing a series of large-scale woodcut prints at his SCREAMS exhibition at White Cube, the new visuals by Chris Marclay, which is composed of comic faces from manga books, are collaged into new “emotionally charged hybrid cartoon characters” and were inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Incorporating unique textures to re-represent elements such as eyes, sound waves, chin, nose, and ears with plywood woodcuts which were once a small-scale collage piece; Chris Marclay takes a look not just into the “intriguing visual interplay of push-and-pull tension” between the image, the texture, and the sonic dimension, but also how “an image is expressive of sound, how sound is expressed visually”. His ‘sampled’ aesthetic stems from his style of using only fragments from the popular culture, including video, photography, and printmaking, to “arrive at new forms and meanings through re-contextualization”.
Christian Marclay – SCREAMS
16 November 2017 − 13 January 2018
White Cube, G/F + 1/F, 50 Connaught Road Central
Photo credit:
© the artist. Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)
White Cube + Kit Min Lee
