GEORGE J. E. SAKKAL
MAXIMISM
NOUVEAU COLLAGE
In 1912 the French artist, George Braque, created the first fine art paper collage. Braque’s accomplishment was revolutionary. His innovation ushered in a new era in art. The monopoly technique of painting with a brush was now permanently altered. The paper collage changed forever the regard for the use of the traditional paint/brush stroke process as the means to produce art. Fifty years later in 1962, with the creation of my first collage, I discovered a process to apply paper so that the finished work appears to be painted… equivalent to the paint/brush stroke process, this furthering the use of paper as a fine art medium.
In the seventeen years that followed (1962-79) I performed extensive experiments with this medium. From the results of these experiments I came to realize that paper offered unlimited possibilities for the creation of art. I concluded that for most of the 20th century, paper’s use, at best, had been minimally understood, appreciated or exploited as an art medium. I observed that most collagists who used magazine photographs as their paper source used the photo while avoiding the photo’s important properties. These properties, inherent within each photo, are it’s flat color, color with texture and color with structure. Each of these properties can be separated out from the original photo(s) to create a paper palette. A palette formed from numerous photos into a multitude of small paper parts, could then be used to compose as if painting to create a “nouveau” form of paper collage. The resulting work bears no resemblance to the photos from which it originated. Applying the inherent properties within photos enables me to create a painterly form of collage that is intensely complex, visually dynamic, and highly explosive. The discovery revolutionizes the understanding of how paper obtained from photographic sources can be used. I refer to this result as “obsessive visuality” (OV). OV art purposefully counters nihilistic, conceptualized art created by the ideologically based Post Modern art movements. OV art launches a new, avant-garde art movement versed in methodology, not ideology that seeks to celebrate and to maximize the human retinal experience. I have named this movement, Maximism.