Jesse Owens 11x14

• 100% cotton archival quality paper.
• High quality printing with real pigment inks.

From the artist:

My collages are born of love stories with archive documents. The overwhelming emotional tension felt as we plunge into Freud’s notebooks, the botanical illustrations of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, or Sartre and de Beauvoir’s correspondence, all of it is so titillating.

Archives lead us back to memories of the everyday, they gel the passage of people and cultures in time. It is incredibly moving. So many marvels are sleeping on the shelves; it stirs the desire to do something with them.

I mix my findings with handmade paper. I also use old cotton and linen clothes as well as plants in the process. The fibre is shredded, and then brought back to its original form before being made into paper. Reusing materials is an important part of my process. Paper, being replaced by the digital, has an ever-smaller place in our everyday life, but I love to think that it could go back to its first love. I would like it to be used as a noble material again, something reserved for important matters, like art!

Beauty is what I strive to illustrate, serendipity and nature with its infinite colours, and wacky ideas too, especially those weaving unexpected connections between us. I think that by pasting chunks of reality representing an ideal of the world, reminding people of its unity and of its wonders, maybe others will want to believe in this ideal world too. Maybe they will want to make the efforts to concretely tend towards this new vision and actually preserve it.

By mixing apparently estranged elements, be it by time, cultures, seasons, colours, etc., shocks are produced and more often than not, curious and fruitful esthetics appear. I feel a little victorious whenever something workable comes out of it. It proves that differences are no boundaries to cohabitation and that harmony can hatch in palettes where you don’t expect it.