Dilar Periera - Portugal - collage on canvas - each 16x16 inches
ART OF COLLAGE AND THE DAILY COLLAGE PROJECT
In my collage work inspiration and materials come from found-papers that surround our
daily lives and usually end up having an ephemeral existence from the most obvious to
the most unusual and unsuspected such as posters, newspapers, packages, tickets,
brochures, magazines, postcards, advertising, among many others.
My process of plastic improvisation based creation requires a demand for selfdiscipline
that led to the settlement of Daily Collage Project in 2006. This project aims
to create a collage every day which turns out to be a personal dairy which also acts itself
as a commentary on everyday life.
The relationship word/image, the incorporation of typographic and commercial
elements, the scale and juxtaposition of different textures and shapes, reflects many
aspects of the historical background of this collage technique, such as the early 20th
century artists (Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, by example), or latest
American artists like Joseph Cornell and Robert Motherweel, among others.
TECHNICAL PROCESS AND THE OPERATIVE ACT
The discovery and use of materials related to everyday life, from recycling or the daily
practice of gleaning materials is reflected in the handling of a dual language discourse.
On one hand, it reveals a conceptual sense on improvisational relations in colors,
images, textures, forms, meanings, pictograms; on the other, it focus on mono and
polysemy of language associations among titles, images and signs. Color is the one
characteristic inherent to used materials.
The decision to embrace this technical process is related to the fact that collage
is a recurring feature in my artwork. Sometimes I use transfer techniques that allow the
juxtaposition of images, or vintage images that give the work a new element of
something remote, appealing to our collective memory, although
collages emerge as practices of plastic improvisation whose ephemeral condition
acquire new meanings as a result of the clashes, tensions, dialogues, balances from their
spontaneous combination.
Each work is a dynamic impulse of the act of tearing, select and re-render, and a
material combination of different pieces ending in experimentation built from
discovery. There is an idea of gaming, connected to the act of adjusting, juxtaposing,
uniting, as a daily playful operation breaking the monotony of everyday life.
Improvisation is the result of instant choices – choice made "by itself", cleared
from what is around and of what’s happening. One practice of a combined exercise,
which tears, destroys and rebuilds a work in progress taking place from the act of
dealing with "what is around," like an instant of an event.
In addition to operative act it is the intellectual doing and the visibility that matters.
There is no narrative sense in each collage, but maybe one can be found in Daily
Collage Project. It does not intend to tell a story, but there is a loose speech on daily life
which inhabits time.
Dilar Pereira
Lisboa, September 18th, 2011
