- - - - - - - - - - Cecil TOUCHON

Touchon creates non-objective, mixed media works that are saturated with a sort of recherche, Proustian elegance. Fusing drawing, painting and collage, he creates serenely abstract images that recall early-20th century Constructivism and Synthetic Cubism. In works large and small, flat areas of rich color are layered with old envelopes, bits of sheet music and other romantic ephemera in works that are nostalgic and knowing, wistful and buoyant -- and above all else -- intensely atmospheric..."

"Touchon's works are a celebration of such early modernist -isms as Miro's surrealism, Russian constructivism, synthetic cubism, futurism and orphism. Not to mention Matisse's late collaged images. And -- prodigiously, almost alarmingly, talented -- Touchon (born 1956, Austin, Texas) makes some of the most gorgeous mixed-media paintings you could hope to see... Also, in his virtuoso synthesis of overlapping, dissolving planes, vortices and cutout arabesques -- the visual hallmarks of early modernism -- he subverts what was radical about modernism in the first place. In Touchon's hands, it becomes a mothe lode of lovely compositional elements..." Janet Tyson