Cecil

Touchon

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In the work of Cecil Touchon, fragments speak in half-formed gestures, where typography sheds its function and becomes pure, pulsing texture. His collages inhabit the space between control and fracture, pulling us into the anatomy of language undone. Through his frequent newsletters, Touchon shares the evolution of his practice—his writing, research, and the shifting rhythms of his work. A master of the medium, he leans into experimentation and chance as his primary tools, letting unpredictability guide his compositions and pushing the boundaries of what collage can be.

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I started making collages seriously as a form of diary in 1982. At that time, I decided that I would just do whatever came to me as an idea for collage or respond to the materials collected. Over the last 40 plus years I have completed a collage, on average every three days. They are all sequentially numbered from the beginning. Archiving and documentation are very important to me. I like to say; “All an artist gets to keep is his trail.” Every work of art is like a trail marker on a developing map if it is well documented.

Hence, over so many years my interests and philosophy has slowly developed in a number of directions. When I come across a certain approach of interest I will isolate it into an ongoing suite of works within my body of work. I have a number of different open ended suites of works exploring different things over long periods of time. Almost all of them are abstract in nature and usually have something to do with text, mark-making, chance operations, and compositional ideas.

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I decided pretty early on that I did not want to work in such a way that my art depended on a particular location. I think of my mind as my central location regardless of where I happen to be at any given time. However, the environment does have an effect on one’s work to some extent. I might see something that will cause me to explore the idea in a suite of collages or drawings. I like the high desert and the mountains, the light and the palette and forms of the landscape.

I often have collected materials from places where I travel to. This area does not seem to have much found paper like in some cities such as Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, London or New York. When I travel to cities I usually scavenge and collect collage materials to bring back to my studio. Otherwise, I have spent many years collecting paper at flea markets, used bookstores, antique or junk shops, etc. since the early 1980’s. I have multiple lifetimes worth of paper at this point dating as far back as the 1800’s.

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Most of my art making is based directly on chance aesthetics which is to say that this is the way that I interact with my collage materials. The structure part is in setting up what you might call a corral of limitations to fence in the range of things that can happen and then let chance do its thing within those limits. So, in that sense I work very spontaneously and allow for the unpredictable within the set of limitations that I impose ahead of time. I suppose you could call this ‘chance aided’. I think in terms of experimentation as opposed to self-expression. It is impossible to remove oneself or one’s biases from the process but it is not my goal to express myself. I don’t particularly have anything to say which reminds me of the John Cage quote: “I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.” Cage was also a proponent of the aesthetics of chance.

Chance is a living thing in my opinion that is always changing in each moment into a new unique moment. I call it the Great Harmony – the living music of Life itself. This is the main thing I feel that I am interacting and conversing with in my work. I am trying to listen to it and let it express itself so the more in a state of flow or creative selflessness or equanimity I can achieve while working the better.

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Cecil Touchon (born 1956, Austin, Texas) is a contemporary American collage artist, painter, published poet and theorist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Co-founder of the International Post-Dogmatist Group, Touchon is director of the group's Ontological Museum, Founder of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction and founder of the International Society of Assemblage and Collage Artists. Cecil Touchon is best known for his Typographic Abstraction works that 'Free the letters from their burden of being bearers of meaning'.

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