Paper, Lyrical

A.D. Sauzey’s art of painting with colored papers torn from magazines, long the profound and inimitable originality of her collages, is coupled in her recent work with a stark reference to books — to the book as an object.

Toying with the pattern of a book’s closed pages, she can also open them into myriads of wings; then, the architectural alliteration of golden spines on the library’s shelves come into play; and she refashions them in piles of colored odds-and-ends which bear the traces of handwriting, of ageless drawings tinted or not (n.13). This is paper out of control — or rather under a supreme control of a new kind.

The presence of recognizable objects in the chromatic, both lyrical and abstract compositions of A.D. Sauzey is nothing new. In a 1992 collage, against a black background, large putty-colored fragments, as if etched with a trowel, frame a window which suddenly endows the composition with the depth that, in turn, suggests the artist’s atelier. Elsewhere, a long horizontal molding endows the two unequal parts of the collage which it demarcates with the smooth curve of its strips on top of laminated wavelets.¹

Each and every collage by A.D.S. is a throw of the dice whose multiple and surprising results defy the most eager believer in change, so keenly they seem to come from an ever-new, ever-unpredictable source.

The 2001 works, with their frequent reference to books, are no exception. Spine, edge, cover: one part of the object finds its name here; its weight within the whole collage may vary; yet, visible or blended as it may be, it always remains a call-back to its own matter.

This is how A.D.S.’s collages evoke for us the duality of the thing: almost whispered into the formal apparatus, and paired with nearby fragments without ever losing its specific nature, it speaks of the world — much like Chardin or Morandi know how to conjure up carefully assembled objects in function of the work to be painted. Only, here, in the collage, this assemblage is in itself the very soul of the work.

Thus, in what could well be an homage to Joseph Cornell (n. 4), a book’s edge becomes the wake of a box which sails somehow into the black velvet of a much vaster sea where torn paper and bits of prints act as a screen (collages, like dreams, can also play on words after all).

Elsewhere (n. 14) the wine-scarlet cover of a Larousse lexicon, chosen as a base — you would swear it was a palette — is shuttered on the left by the huge ink spot of black paper, while the other side of the book’s spine, untouched, reminds one that it is an Italian-French dictionary. And the flap on the right side garners the instructive and reversed layers of a Mediterranean habitat, both cavernous and merry.

Much like contemporary poetry, A.D. Sauzey’s collages offer to the observant eye spaces and orbits of travel. As such, they elicit a work of reconnaissance which shuttles between the whole and the parts. To lead us on this itinerary, the manifest tear of the paper — a true signature of these collages — brings into their very structure the live trace of the gesture which played with them.

Hence, the mysterious attraction exerted by these compositions — so many reflections of a violence, a randomness and a chaos mastered for a time. To wit, among parcels of straddling skies (n. 9) at the bottom of a large frontispiece-like arrangement, the old edge of a book which seems to have been inserted, as in some sort of armoire with shelves, in order to absorb the ardor of winds, clouds, and damp.

Eugène Nicole
New York, March 2002

¹ A.D. Sauzey, Collages 1983–1993, Milano 1996, pp. 14, 16.