They are born in a space/time, or rather an instant/site, whose ever singular trace they perpetuate; even at their most luxuriant, their compositions stand as serene statements of a subtle and rigorous alliance of both color and form. At the outset, A.D. Sauzey’s collages root our sight in a grid of intriguing recognitions. Hospitable yet unfamiliar, alternatively a display or a well of unexpected encounters, this world questions as much as it gratifies its viewer.

Why not ask in the first place: “made of what?” The medium seems at times to remember what it used to be: a visual cut-out from a mass-circulation magazine; or some glossy paper found in, say, a decoration monthly which, at a mere nail’s scratch, may revive the image of an object—a moulding, a window—and above all, through the juxtaposition of many fragments, reveals that thinnest of slivers which conjures up amid the colors the white core of the paper’s very fabric.

At first a tear, whence a mere parcel derives its shape; and then a shape—a shape which, half-way between what intends to be a form and what intends to “tell”, seems to wonder: What am I? That sliver, that lining on the edges, they are the features which single out these collages as purified of all but the mere ordinance of fragments. It is the very earnestness in which these fragments exist here as what they are, fragments, which makes for the lyricism of the whole—whether they stand squarely apart from each other against the background; or when they dare to mix and overlap, and thereby pioneer one of the most successful perspectives ever tried in this genre.

For what we have here is mere paper: torn papers, these vast white flaps, these towers and the strange black bird they seem to have let loose over a semblance, a reddening reflection, of a cityscape at sunset. Second-hand papers, these inspired wings, or these whiffs of a fan, or these screens superposed on a studio’s window. A paper mosaic, these marshlands where water takes its time to inhabit piers and leave reminders of its minute flotsam, tolling as it were the depth of its last touch.

So many “small strokes”, says the artist, who confesses her indifference to life-size. And indeed, the very smallness of her collages also questions us about their hidden “scale”—the peculiar livelihood of their world, and how we might fit in it.

Could it be that, here, “collage” exceeds the powers of painting? No doubt, in the left angle of a 1988 composition (page 10), a white and blue fragment suggests a snow-capped volcano; and in the “raised stones” of the foreground, what gigantic obstructions, especially at the top of the sky, have filled the gap? In those large fragments of overlapping papers which seem no less light, midway between cloud and asteroid, now very near, above the black druidic monuments? That black which seems difficult to use in painting and which, in these works, is one of the dominant colors.

Elsewhere, in the collage “à la moulure” (1993, page 16), echoed by little blue and white wavelets in the upper register, the edging of the large green panel (slightly stamped on the right) seems to rise vertically at the back of a foreground made up of telluric embankments ranging from pink to red, into which is planted a black ploughshare or, still roughly squared, that boat which appears in other compositions by the artist—a memory perhaps of the sublime little vessel with which Ambrogio Lorenzetti adorned one of his most poetic landscapes.

If it appeared at the beginning of this century as a “challenge to painting”, in Aragon’s phrase, collage in A.D. Sauzey’s work comes so close to painting, through the détour of paper and in the play of its colorism, that one may rightfully regard these works as paintings. And if these collages continue the history of painting, one might also see in them the work of one of those “masters of the border” who emerged, among others, in certain almost abstract compositions of Persian miniature painting.

Eugène Nicole
New York, December 1995