// CHROMO / DOUBLE HINGE / STEEL HANDLE
// L. 180 x th. 3 x h. 160 CM

// SINGLE PIECE

Is the digital transition something other than a second Industrial Revolution? Are we forgetting too quickly this second half of the 19th century during which, for the first time, speed and multiplication invaded every corner of daily life to the point that images were becoming democratized everywhere? They are now accessible to everyone; this is a first for our society, the impact of which is still difficult to measure today. This folding screen with "cut-outs" reminds us that the taste for accumulation, before being a criticism of the excesses of consumption, was in fact a tribute.

In the middle of the 19th century, printing techniques adopted an industrial model with words and images within everyone's reach. And it is through color that luxury distinguishes itself from the ordinary. Until the 1930s, chromolithography was the only printing technique capable of producing colored prints after a long, costly and, indeed, luxurious process. A curious practice that the seventeenth century had initiated in the aristocratic courts and that our time is now observing with amused eyes is awakened: the cutting and pasting of images on all kinds of supports - of which folding screens are the most appreciated - reached its peak in the 1860s although still alive in the 1880s - 1890s. The infatuation that prevailed especially in Victorian England was fueled by picture books specially designed for this practice. The motifs imagined by English designers were printed in Germany, whose reputation for printing and luxury papers was then well established. Very thick, German papers stand out from the cheaper, thinner and more fragile ordinary prints reserved for newspapers and gazettes. A very specialized production was set up, always favoring the same themes that make the character of the cut-out screens: childhood, botany and domestic animals, landscapes and architectural motifs rub shoulders with exotic-looking characters, soldiers as well, objects sometimes (teapots are in a good place) or butterflies and birds. The screens that came back in grace in Victorian interiors are then the support of the poetic expression of the wives and young girls of the Middle class. Specialized manuals and art critics gave their advice on composition, and we can always note the injunction to the artistic flight of fancy that kept the conversation alive in the living room. The accumulation of colorful images does not only appeal to women. By its novelty and modernism, the practice attracts great names as evidenced by the cut-out screens of boxers by Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) or the one created by Hans Christian Andersen (1805 - 1875) who preferred big ideas to big muscles, declining on each sheet his vision of a country through the portraits of its political, scientific or artistic personalities, accompanied by monuments and historical or cultural particularities.

Let's not discredit this screen, which is too far removed from our contemporary aesthetic habits; on the contrary, it is one of its major representatives. For cut-outs and collages of images are not early practices: they appeared at the end of the 17th century in Venice, which made it a specialty known as Arte Povera, even though this occupation was exclusively that of the Italian, then German and French aristocratic elites. The Arte Povera of the 1960s - a rebel movement, a critic of the consumer society and of the art of the elites - established itself as a perfect antagonist of this elitist Venetian and then European practice. One can guess this deliberate irony.

Let's take our folding screen and oppose it to Tejo Remy's Rag Chair: with a similar artistic approach (accumulation), the means used and the message conveyed are in every way opposed. To the accumulation of images on this screen (1880 - 1890), emblem of the power of an industrial production that is only at its beginnings, the rags and rags of the Rag Chair (1991) are the modest witnesses of the monstrous runaway of the machine. To the aesthetics of accumulation, two antitheses separated by a century illustrate the two antipodes of the same industrial phenomenon. In the meantime, the Dadas, the Surrealists and other Cubists take hold of the cut-outs and collages and detach them from adult concerns as our environment becomes purer. Today, this folding screen with cut-outs achieves the goal that its creator probably set for himself or herself, whose signature still remains. The profusion and diversity of the images are constrained by our contemporary eyes to the only ravishing evocation of the wonder of childhood, the only period of our life where images are everywhere, curious, colorful and of all kinds of styles and features. No doubt the artistic approach of this folding screen with cut-outs has today taken precedence over the cultural and economic echo it embodied at the turn of the 20th century.

Text by Marielle Brie