collage

In 1937, Max Ernst offered a striking description in his essay "Beyond Painting." Drawing on Lautréamont’s image of “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” Ernst describes collage as the collision and reconciliation of distant realities—an act of displacement so complete it leads to transmutation.

In Model Collapse, collage becomes a response to the instability of the present. We live amidst a visual and conceptual surplus in which meanings—historical, symbolic, material—are no longer stable but in flux. These works begin with chaos, not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to inhabit.

The pieces engage the formal and compositional traditions of painting but work to disrupt and reoccupy them. They seek to bring incompatible realities into proximity on unfamiliar ground, to allow their confrontation and reconciliation to generate new poetic forms—fractured, hybrid, and resonant.

This series is not nostalgic for coherence but committed to the search for meaning within disorientation. It treats beauty as something emergent rather than imposed, and collage as a practice of attention, discovery, and deliberate misalignment.

The model has collapsed. Something else begins.