Fragments of the imagination

In “Fragments”, David Delruelle resamples the days of our lives for a poetic take on the art of collage and memory.

You wouldn’t think it, based on the precision and finesse of the work that he is showing at Espace Sablon, but in “Fragments”, David Delruelle has left his comfort zone. Until recently, it was located in some unidentified place in the Milky Way, where you can sail to the moon, climb a stairway to heaven, or hop on an old-fashioned tram for the morning commute to your lunar office. Those explorations into undiscovered universes, situated somewhere between the visible and the imaginary, came about by cutting up and meticulously recombining images from vintage National Geographic copies. This time however, there is no uncharted territory to be explored; it’s the remnants of a recognisable yet irrevocably lost past, that are the raw materials for an expedition no less enticing than the one into the cosmos.

For his “Fragments” series, David Delruelle gathered collections of old black-and-white family photos, going back as far as the 1920s. You see single, ripped fragments – sometimes only a tiny shred – of hands playing a piano, a child’s school portrait, the steeple of a church, the bottom half of a wedding dress; a triptych of (intact) holiday pictures at the seaside; or a two-part collage of half a cowboy in a meadow/garden… All very personal, visual remains of faded memories, resampled to evoke lost pasts and at the same time allow for a universal track of thought.

It is that friction between destruction – visible in the torn edges – and renewal – new meaning generated by recontextualisation – that links collage to life, and makes it such an appealing art form. An art form that David Delruelle approaches in a poetic and minimalist fashion, reminiscent of John Stezaker. Where what you don’t see matters just as much as what you do see, where a fragment can spark the imagination to fill in the blanks and create a bridge between the personal and the universal. Because we all care, miss, love, bleed, forget, and remember the same way, whatever part of the cosmos you’re in.

DAVID DELRUELLE: FRAGMENTS ••••
> 21/5, Espace Sablon, www.espacesablon.com