GEORGE SAKKAL

OBSESSIVE VISUALITY

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 appeared to be the equivalent of a painting thus advancing paper as a fine art medium.

     In the seventeen years that followed (1962-79) I performed extensive experiments with this medium. The results of these experiments made me realize that paper offered unlimited possibilities for the creation of art. I concluded that for most of the 20th century, paper’s use had been minimally understood, appreciated or exploited as an art medium. I observed that most collagists who used magazine photographs as their paper source apply the photo while ignoring a photo’s important inherent properties. These properties within a photo are flat color, color with texture and color with structure. Each of these properties can be separated out and formed into a multitude of small paper parts. These parts can be used intuitively in search of   a composition and applied from all four sides of the work surface until the art is revealed. At the point of discovery attention gradually shifts away from intuition toward cognition as the work is increasingly defined, detailed and refined into a finished collage. The resulting work bears no resemblance to the photos from which it originated. Applying inherent properties within photos, involving the steps of search, discovery and refinement, creates a collage that is intensely complex, visually dynamic, and highly explosive.

     I refer to this result as “obsessive visuality” (OV). OV art totally counters “concept” art advocated by Post Modern art theory. OV art personifies the importance of the visual in the configuration of art. It resorts to methodology not ideology. It subscribes to a belief that art is the creative manifestation of the human experience. Its depiction originates with an intuition that draws from a vast wealth of human experience stored in the unconscious mind. It relies upon the near infinite capacity and miraculous functionality of the human retina acting in conjunction with intuition to achieve artistic creativity.