31 May – 30 June 2012

This ensemble of oil paintings on canvas in The Appearance of the Collage marked an evolution and an enrichment of the reflexion of Ilya & Emilia Kabakov for over a decade on the status of images from the past, on how they work and the complex relations they maintain with memory.

The large paintings and the drawings exhibited in the main space of the gallery are composed of “trompe l’oeil” juxtapositions, ripped and assembled images that may seem random at first sight. The image thus reconstituted creates a partial and necessarily artificial reality.

Visual metaphors of the manipulation of memory and traces from the past, the pictorial elements are put together in order to compose a new reality. The superimposed images distort the harmony, the notion of detail and sometimes hide a part of reality. By appending themselves, the images created a new composition and a new meaning. The superimposed images create, by adjoining themselves, a new composition and therefore a new sense. In the Kabakov’s mind, the images are insidious witnesses evoking a past that has never existed. By their will, the artists appropriated the past and creatde an alternative reality that will be reconstructed, enriched and disguised through the viewer’s own life experiment.