'Cecil Touchon: New Works and Old Favorites' at Emily Amy Gallery

October 28 - December 3, 2011

Reception for the artists: Friday October 28th, 7-10 pm

'Cecil Touchon: New Works and Old Favorites' Opens next Friday!

Opening Reception:  Friday, October 28th, from 7 - 10 pm  RSVP Here
Exhibition Dates:  October 28 - December 3, 2011
EMILY AMY GALLERY is pleased to present our second fall exhibition, Cecil Touchon: New Works and Old Favorites, featuring renowned collage artist, Cecil Touchon.  The show will include new collages on paper as well as works on panel and canvas from the breadth of the artist's own personal collection.  Cecil Touchon: New Works and Old Favorites  is Colorado-based Cecil Touchon's first solo exhibition, and second time exhibiting at Emily Amy Gallery.  Touchon views collage as directly reflective of his personal experience.  He states, “This fleeting quality of papers and messages and the images they contain seems a fitting material for the contemplation of our temporal condition--of our brief sojourn in this world.”  Please join us in celebrating the opening reception of this exhibition, Friday, October 28th, from 7-10 pm. 
Touchon’s ultimate goal in his art-making is to address notions of beauty through purely visual communication.  In this body of work, he does just that.  Instead of trying to invent new and fresh concepts and “ism”’s within his own artwork, he pays homage to the last century.  Following this idea, Touchon begins to re-examine various avant-garde movements of the last 100 years, including but not limited to Synthetic Cubism, Constructivism, and Fluxus.  He views his role as somewhat of an excavator, bringing to light many once dismissed artistic viewpoints for further consideration.  Working abstractly through collage and painting, Touchon remains tied to the past by hinting at traditions and practices utilized by the modern masters.
Employing classic color schemes and compositions akin to that of Mondrian, Touchon creates collages that recall the past and harken the future.  By delicately shading and manipulating lines, he often creates a trompe l’oeil painting.  In his collage process, he deconstructs and then reconstructs elements, which is where his artistic genius lies.  Physical objects are distilled down and re-contextualized as shapes, lines, and colors that result ultimately in a beautiful abstraction that speaks to a broad audience.  In his hallmark works of typographical nature, pieces of letters and words, once recognizable, take on new meaning as they become single elements of design.  The result of all of this manipulation is a visual language of beauty, which celebrates the true essence of Touchon’s oeuvre.
Born and raised in Texas, Touchon attended North Texas State University in Denton and the University of Texas at Arlington.  The highly acclaimed artist has exhibited in galleries and museums in Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Boston, Houston, St. Louis, and Atlanta. International exhibitions include venues in Paris; Amsterdam; Berlin; Cuernavaca, Mexico; and Italy, where he participated in the Venice Biennial in 2009 and 2001.  Touchon’s work appears in the collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Tate Modern in London.  His works are found in many corporate collections including those of IBM, HBO, American Airlines, American Express, Citibank, Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel, Neiman Marcus, Hallmark and the Sanyo Corporation.  Touchon is the founder and director of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction and co-founder of the International Post-Dogmatist Group.  He has been featured in dozens of national magazines, design books, and scholarly publications.