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Paolozzi and the Collage Graphic.

From almost the the very first stirrings of his artistic output, Eduardo Paolozzi has sought the combination of an enormous compendium of visual ideas, and delved into their true possibilities through his unerring mastery of the collage technique. 

His ethos is not that of the Surrealists, his printed collage works are not those of Max Ernst's illustrated novels or dream-pictures - instead Paolozzi's collages are a compendia of odd and common things, the machine as human, contemporary trash shown in all the beauty of its artificiality.

Like his sculptures, Paolozzi's graphics indicate an inexhaustible imagination, which is constantly reformulating and transforming reality, a fund of astonishingly comprehensive information. As a whole, Paolozzi's graphics are densely composed and sumptuously coloured. They are constructed from abstract sources, with flat forms either lying alongside each other or closely meshed into each other. They form a self-contained and balanced whole in the sense of an abstract. Pictorial images, from the realm of technical illustration, of glossy magazine photography and science fiction are built into this structure with heterogenous variation. Human figures or cut-out ducks seamlessly paired with mysterious non-organic linear blocks. What is of consistent importance in all of Paolozzi's collage graphics is that their two integral elements should not appear separate - the abstract framework and the appropriated images inserted into it - but that they enter into an intense relationship of flat surface.

Whilst the large Pop collage screenprints of the 1960s included such familiar icons as Mickey Mouse, in the decades to follow Paolozzi found a new form of expression in his graphic work. The untreated picture elements receded in favour of pure abstract shapes. Even these forms are derivative but the degree of their processing, elaboration, and therefore of their alienation from the original association, is greater and more unified. This is collage in its purest form, where it is not merely a technical process, but a principle concerning content. Paolozzi threw the established values of high and low art into total disorder. Through his use of collage he was to render such arguments as impotent by bringing equal significance to every aspect of the visible environment.

It was not only the iconography of graphic printing that was evidenced through collage, it was also the formation, dovetailing and interweaving of pictorial elements of quite different kinds, different surface structures, different kinds of artistic or graphic characteristics into new and closely unified surface relationships. The collage elements in these prints never quite betray their origin, but rather join together in their new relationships to form new, independent images with individual associations, that point way beyond their origins. Paolozzi's collage graphics have never amounted to a simple slogan, but on the contrary to a confusing, highly associative image, which will not be elucidated by literary interpretation.

(Tim Byers- Sims Reed)