Cecil Touchon

A prominent member of the Massurrealist Society (founded in 1987 by James Seehafer) Touchon explores the various strands of the construct he identifies as the ‘massurreality’ - the meta discourse of globalization as it relates to modernist art and its aspirations to radically recreate the world in a utopian fashion. Touchon’s installation of hundreds of works on paper, digital photographs, notes, poems, and sound collages in constant loop on several portable CD players connected to headphones, seeks to overwhelm the viewer with an inordinate amount of information intended to simulate his sense of information overload as typified by the Internet – the ultimate expression of Modernist Culture.

A basic premise of the exhibition is that we are living in the future world designed by the modernist pioneers of the creative community between the World Wars of the 20th Century and which only existed as a science fiction type dream of the future only 80 years ago. Touchon’s exhibit seems to ask the question; ‘So where to from here?’

As one stops to ponder the message presented by Touchon’s exhibit, it becomes clear that the exhibit is the product of a multifarious inquiry into the variegated intentions of many different avant garde artistic heritages from the past with the purpose being to find the spiritual underpinings that give our present modern life a value worth spending one’s time to pursue. These heritages include Constructivism, Minimalism, de Stijl, Bauhaus, Cubism, Futurism, Letterism, Fluxus and other visual idioms of the last 100 years that Touchon combines, recombines, mutates and contorts in order to find new and unexpected combinations. Touchon maintains his center in seeking out and exploiting elegant abstract relationships from the heap of visual material his work compiles and explores.

If this doesn’t seem enough to cause overload, add to it a several inch thick pile of ‘collage poems’ constructed by Touchon from material gleaned from email correspondences, spam mail, text from web pages found through strange search processes on Google’s search engine and other digital sources that are cut and pasted line by unrelated line into ambiguous yet provocative clusters of intuitively poetic statements.
It is clear that these are not wholly random, such as John Cage might have constructed by mechanical means but rather are the product of gathering and constructing the lines of text into collages not unlike his visual works. Other compilations of notes, books in progress and the like are on view.

Then there are the sound collages called Massurrealist Meditations that can only be heard through the earphones attached to portable CD players where several minutes of constructed sound works are playing on continuous loop so you don’t know where they start or stop. These works are composed of sounds from Touchon’s field recordings of Paris subways, Mexican market places and water parks and/or ‘found noises’ that Touchon appropriates from unnamed sources on the internet which he manipulates and alters with audio editing software on his computer in the manor of which is currently known as Microsound. The works range in emotive content from frantic to sublime to humorous and clever.

In addition there are digital photographs taken of scrambled TV images that have then been blown up, amplified, edited, isolated into lovely, lyrical abstract relationships of color and form. And there’s more! But you’ll just have to go see the show for yourself.




A Statement by Cecil Touchon for a Show at Cidnee Patrick Gallery Opening Jan 18, 2003
My work continues to be influenced by ideas related to poetry, information,
massurrealism, the internet and abstraction. Much of my work this last two
years has been involved with the use of lettering to create abstract
relationships and rhythms. I have been writing - or rather constructing - a
great deal of collage poetry composed of electronic email and other digital
texts found on the internet and collage sound works composed of
electronically manipulated snippets of sound from a wide variety of sources but most
related to or found on the internet. In fact the internet is the central
theme of much of my activities though, artistically I do not have much
interest in the 'digital' or high tech look. I am not particularity
interested in mechanical forms of artistic production at this time but still
regard the practice of art making as a spiritually based activity. What I
mean by 'spiritually based' is somewhat ambiguous. It has to do with one's
personal relationship to the life around one and the inner promptings of the
heart - of intuition: of an intuitive process of working. Collage for me
is the perfect medium for this form of expression because one's involvement
is based in the development of a sensitivity toward and an appreciation of
the materials one is working with, which in all most all cases are ephemeral
in nature. This fleeting quality of papers and the messages and images they
contain seems a fitting material for the contemplation of our temporal
condition - of our brief sojourn in this world the world known in the Cabala
as Olahm Ha-Assiah, the material world, the world of shells.
According to this same thought, to make art from these things, to respect
them, to order them, to give them a new life is a kind of restoration of the
world, a way to symbolically have mercy on the world. They say that in all
things are sparks of the divine and that they live in these shards, in this
world of shells and that these sparks wish to find their way back to the
source from which they originated and you could say that this is the very
light of God desiring to unify itself. So as an artist the development of
one's work is to ever become more sensitive, ever more aware of the world
around one and especially the visual world which is a language in itself.
There are traditions in art of imposing mythic themes upon artistic
expression and there is again, something heroic in the idea but I propose
that everything no matter how humble is a part of this heroic struggle
toward the release from limitation and the embrace of beauty for light is
the source of all that we know as beautiful and the absorption in light is
to be beauty itself.
So I suppose behind it all, the struggle for commercial success, for
dominance, for clarity, for joy, for understanding, for a sense of
fulfillment, these are all a part of a drive toward the return; a return of
the sparks of Life toward their source, and all of our struggling and
fighting and stress that we suffer are a release of that energy which wished
to be free and wished to return. I know this may be hard to see in my work.
But I work in a completely visual manner and the very act of creating my art
is a participation in this struggle. In Mexico there are a lot of posters in
our area for La Lucha which are the wrestling matches and La Lucha means
wrestle and wrestle mean struggle and a major source material
for my work this last couple of years has been wrestling posters.
I see the term La Lucha as a very potent symbol of the nature of life and
certainly the life of an artist. There is in the wrestling matches a small
area where men dress up in a comic way with their masks and their personas
that they wish to project and the voluptuous women in bathing suits and the
whole thing is a kind of funny spectacle and a parody of the heroic struggle
that the arts often attempt to articulate but it contains all of the
elements - as a performance and a subculture - that animate the life around
us. Yet in is quirkiness, in its failure to achieve or even strive for
something sublime it makes one uncomfortable and there is an underlying
feeling of distastefulness.
Before, in Picasso's day, he saw the bullfights in the same light and I am
sure he felt the metaphoric relationship of the bull fights to the nature of
life in general, only today, with the wrestling matches it is not man
against nature but man against man and man as persona and persona as public
spectacle. The same with works of art and with the work of the artist in
general. There is a need to establish a level of spectacle, of excitement
and engagement and everything in the commercial aspect of the art world is
like that to a certain extent. It is a careful process of the management of
perception and of presenting the work of artists in such a way that the
observer is lead to have an appreciation of the works presented. This is a
good thing I think, it is why we put a frame on things, to give them, not
only protection but a sense of value and dignity. The experience of art is a
delicate one and there are always those who wish to dismiss art as
insubstantial and as of little worth and this is clearly evident in the
school systems, all things creative, that strive toward beauty or
sensitivity seem to have unrelentingly been removed from the daily
disciplines of the children but I have to ask, what is the value of
knowledge and technology if intuition, observation and a sense of the dignity of
things and of ourselves has not been inculcated?

Statement related to the visual poetry aspect in my work…
Touchon’s work helps us to see more clearly something that has always been present in language of any sort: a certain claustrophobia; a claustrophobic feeling that something new and unknown gives us like confronting the elements of letters from a foreign language that we cannot convert to a familiar ‘known’.

There’s a need in our culture to find the recognizable letters, the meaning, the obvious context of words and to move fluidly to the next word without becoming “caught”. We secretly want to avoid confronting that terror that seems to plague our encounters with texts; that we will not “get it”. With visual poetry we’re often pressed up against language and all of its parts. Touchon’s works contain that panic. We are forced out of the comfort zone in our mind’s constant dialog and onto the surface of his works that become the battleground of our resistance.

These works are an exploration of a classic modernist philosophical issue that dates back to the dawn of modern painterly concerns: non-objectivity and, in Touchon’s case, its relationship to the world of language and poetry. There is a tension between a non objective work and what the mind thinks about when confronted by its hermetic quietude.

Touchon’s non-objective poetic works free the words and letters from their service as carriers of meaning and let their forms communicate from a dignified silence in the primal language of visual art. Repetition, composition, rhythm, contrast, scale, proportion, surface and the resultant harmony experienced or aesthetic response that we have to the work as a totality form the poetic response that we are reading in these works.
One discovers a musicality in these works that convey an intellectual and artistic rigor that gives expression to that realm where words and their meanings fall away and only the eye looks on in a hushed silence.

As we explore Touchon’s works we realize that they have been carefully and consciously composed to release their secrets over an extended viewing of them. We sense that we can probably be surprised by these paintings even after years of repeated viewings. These paintings exhibit a knowledge that we, as viewers, acquire our understanding through the building up of thousands of ‘focal moments’ as our small focal point moves around the work following the rhythms of the arabesques and discover the forms and motifs that reecho across the works.

Artists and poets engage in a trans-temporal dialog speaking to each other across the centuries through their works. Like mystics, they know that their works will have a lasting resonance and that they will inspire and prod and console certain creative souls of future generations as they have been by those whom they study and revere. As viewers we have an opportunity to peek into their conversation through our study of their works.