Cecil Touchon: Songs of the Ineffable

9 - 25 July 2021

Nüart Gallery presents, “Songs of the Ineffable," a solo exhibition of new works by Cecil Touchon. The exhibition will run July 9th through July 25th,  2021 with an opening reception on Friday, July 9th from 5:00 - 7:00 pm.

 

Cecil Touchon’s art is created based on his understanding and inquiry about mark making, poetry, collage, painting, asemic writing and visual musicality. Through his artwork, Touchon’s intention is to communicate an underlying harmony that continuously unfolds into the infinite recesses of the ineffable — the unspoken and the unspeakable.

 

The new artwork in “Songs of the Ineffable”  builds on Touchon’s continued exploration of letters as carriers of sound and meaning. Touchon dissects letters to remove their original meanings, so that they exist in a state of silence in order to become carriers of purely visual rhythms and relationships of shifting positive and negative space.According to Touchon, “The resulting communication is a timeless musicality leading the eye of the viewer on a journey into the realm of the poetic that is beyond the grasp of words.”

 

Touchon’s paintings use trompe l'oeil techniques to painstakingly create the illusion of large collage abstractions. They are characterized by warmly colored geometric shapes — overlapping rectangles and rounded wedges — that seem to revolve and recede into the background. The resulting works are a play of lightness and mass that are both visually striking and, because of the hints of letters, intellectually satisfying. 

 

Cecil Touchon is a painter, performance artist, collector, draftsman, photographer, and curator.  But it is through his collage work that he has made his most lasting mark. His collages are the seeds that grow into his other practices.

 

Touchon was born in Austin, Texas. His artistic inspiration was ignited early and explored throughout his childhood and into his young adulthood. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at Arlington. Throughout his career, which spans over 30 years, Touchon has been collected worldwide and figures prominently in the Massurrealism movement. Touchon is a founding member of the 1987 Post-Dogmatist Group as well as a respected member of the Art Mail and Fluxus communities. Touchon's work was exhibited in the 2001 and 2009 Venice Biennale and can be found in more than 45 corporate and international collections.