COLLAGE AS A LANGUAGE

Jordi Urbón

The Surrealists understood collage as a technique that allowed the artist to escape the strict demands of established procedures and work with absolute freedom. The Dadaists, for their part, saw it as a way of opening up to the unexpected: mixing, fragmenting and juxtaposing apparently unrelated images in order to generate new associations, close to dreams, delirium and the subconscious.

That freedom remains fully relevant today. Collage is no longer simply the act of cutting and pasting; it has become a way of thinking about and constructing images. Its influence runs through much of contemporary artistic practice, where the boundaries between disciplines are becoming increasingly permeable.

Drawing, painting, photography, scanning, materials, textures, objects, software, 3D imagery, video, illustration and film can all coexist within a single work. The analogue and the digital merge; found material is transformed; an image can be fragmented, appropriated and manipulated, acquiring a meaning entirely different from the original.

One can be a painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist, or work simultaneously across all these languages. An artist, ultimately, free to choose the means that each work requires, but also committed to being part of their time: a technological, visual and social age in constant transformation.

Perhaps this is where the enduring relevance of collage lies: in bringing together things that seemingly had no reason to be united and discovering, precisely in that encounter, a new reality.