The group makes no effort to conceal its admiration for the work of Jacques Villeglé and the Affichistes from the 1960s. The mixing up of various drawings, styles, and handwritten traces testifies to the great diversity of sources. In cropping the work and in amassing their own pieces so that they might slash them up, hollow them out, and tear into them, what the artists discover beneath are random compositions, broken letters, while the luck of the rip reveals expanses of color whose juxtapositions may alternatively prove disconcerting or marvelous: figures overlap, complement one another, or, on the contrary, split up, divide, break into fragments, and clash. Moreover, the proliferation of contributors sketches out a utopian creativity that would be present in each individual even as it tends to vindicate their anonymity once it starts to become difficult to distinguish what properly belongs to each. As with Surrealist cadavres exquis, the result obtained exceeds the capacities of each and reveals a dialectical fecundity among points of agreement and dissimilarity. Whether the work would be produced with the help of several known or unknown contributors or by an accumulation of drawings from a single artist, the goal remains the same: foregrounding a universal line that stretches all the way around the world, from Paris to Rio and from New York to Bombay! Reflection of one’s individual personality suddenly gives way so that inspiration might ricochet forevermore off of mirrors made of paper. In the course of spectacular operations, the members of the collective invite participants to rip into the colored layers so that one might see fragments of works being pieced back together as one tears into the monochromatic surface which disappears before one’s very eyes. These original pages are then glued one onto another, so as to produce one thick layer that will be washed over its entire surface with black paint or covered up with yellow, green, or orange paper. Next, the artists transpose all the different offerings onto large, industrial-sized florescent-colored sheets of paper. The main principle at work here is to foreground black-and-white drawing as a way of illustrating lines from every angle: straight, curved, continuous or discontinuous, even or uneven. The members of the collective have handed out “scratch papers” notebooks as a medium for free expression. The idea is for each of the collective’s artists, along with guests from the world over, to offer drawings, writings, signs, logos, photographs, and so on. They cover a site or a canvas with their paper collages, which in the end are concealed beneath a broad flat layer of paint.
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