“Katrien de Blauwer’s collages are truly beautiful, and easily conducive to aesthetic contemplation. It is important however to understand the highly elaborate conceptual structure underlying I do not want to disappear silently into the night. The artist uses photographs from old magazines. She cuts them out in order to keep only the part of the image of interest to her, a part that she then pastes together with another fragment, gluing them together onto sheets of old paper. Sometimes, in a radical move, she uses a single image that she cuts out and recomposes. She thus creates elliptic narratives. The photographs that the artist appropriates for herself are removed from their original context — removed from the magazine pages, thus loosing the integrity supposedly meant to grant them meaning — before being re-contextualized in their new links. Collage as practiced by Katrien de Blauwer evokes cinematographic editing consisting of cutting out a piece from a reel and gluing it to another fragment of film for the purpose of producing a meaningful effect.”
—Rémi Coignet
Avarie is a Paris/Berlin based independent publisher specializing in contemporary art books and directed by Giuliana Prucca
Katrien de Blauwer is a Belgian artist
