To stick, it is to animate a surface, to put L-shaped' imaginary.

Article of Courant Gilles

In 1929, max Ernst makes its first “novel-joining” within the surrealist movement; it names it the woman 100 heads. A few decades later, a child makes his first joinings in the Center of Guénouvry; he names one of them the tree with heads. As other of these works emerges something which mobilizes the imagination and the sensitivity of the subject: of that which create and that which looks at. This something can name the strange one, the odd one, the strange one, the monstrous one, absurd… the sources of this strange, of its creations, could be elsewhere only in the subject wishing and anxious. The strange one appears as message that the subject addresses to itself and with the others.

A little love Paper velvet And of esthetics musiPaper c It is sorrow Papier drawing Before a long time Let slip Glazed paper Feelings Sticking paper Ca impresses Carbon paper But it is wind

The term of collage is difficult to encircle. It appears indefinite and plural. It returns to pictorial, musical, verbal, cinematographic, the joining of objects. With him, one is in the order of poietic, rhetoric, esthetics, the history. One speaks about joinings sometimes like artistic activity specifies sometimes like approximate metaphor. One can even arrive sometimes at an extreme generalization of the “whole is joining”. The only possible definition of the joinings term isn't it itself only one joining? Minor popular art, applied art or artistic expression, joining go up far in the history since the first traces arrived to us through the art of Japanese penmanship and its table-poems date from XIIe century. In the field of the fine arts, the Masters of XIVe and XVe century integrate into their tables of religious inspiration of the real objects or the foreign matters, invaluable stones, collars, plates of gold or money, proverbs or inscriptions, to increase the character crowned their works. During centuries, the artists of reputation as Gentile Bellini (1429-1507) were numerous to have recourse to cutting, the assembly and the joining of the matters. However, they were creations of the economic situation, marginal taking into consideration their usual technique, and not of a technique “thought and contemplated” such as will appear the art of joining with the movements avant-gardists of the XXe century.

The history of modern joining starts in 1912 with the experiment cubist. Joining becomes fundamental element of the pictorial universe then. The blows of scissors and the tears replace the features. Joining implies a new way to design and carry out a work by breaking established conventions contiguous to “traditional work”: there is, for example, abandonment depths of field, prospects and rules governing the creepage distances and the foregrounds, the shades and the lights. The schools, the movements, the currents, philosophies using joinings multiply. Let us quote for example the cubism (Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Juan Gris), dadaism (Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp), surrealism (max Ernst, Miro, Breton, Dali, Magritte)… The technique of joining is simple, even banal. It consists in taking a certain number of elements in works, objects, messages, sets, “whole” already existing and integrating them in a new creation “to produce” an original totality where appear ruptures of the various types. Joining then becomes an assembly by superposition, juxtaposition, composition. It offers a work on the whole and the part of the whole. To stick, it is to animate a surface, to put L-shaped' imaginary. Joining is initially a walk in the middle of the images with the fortuitous meeting of fragments, of parts or pieces. After having placed at the disposal of the catalogues, leaflets, magazines, publicities, books, reviews, newspapers, paper, scissors and adhesive, the child will start to divide into sheets, locate, select, break up, cross, cut out, tear, separate, tear off ..... then to lay out, to combine, bring closer, organize, structure, superimpose, stick, take off, restick… The rhetoric of joining is important, indicative, in particular compared to the type of element or taken message, with the way in which this one is taken and the way in which the child composes or recomposes joining. Such child never uses the scissors; he prefers to tear the pages in strips. Such other, after two years of participation, continues to take whole pages resticking them on a white sheet; there is yet no question of cutting the least small piece of page. This one seems to be interested only in the apparatuses electric household appliances, kitchen utensils, furniture. That one does not have interest, seems it that for food, food promotions of great surfaces. Joining, like a text, is carrying direction. The creator, the child, puts in his work his sensitivity, his phantasms, his madness, his concerns of the moment. To imagine and “inimaginer” The Joinings activity proposed with the children, Guénouvry, is an activity of expression, therapeutic and inductive of change (relationship between the process of creativity and sublimation). This activity rests on the duelle relation and/or groupale. We are in a relational process, in a place of exchange, transfer. The goal of the duelle meeting and/or groupale is not to create an aesthetic work but to use the support of joining with mentaliser the instinctual and imaginary life, to charge the emotional and emotional life, in particular for suffering subjects of a difficulty of symbolizing (to use objects of external reality to approach an interior dimension) We can transpose to joining this reflexion of Rene Passeron: “painting is a bandage of the vacuum. The vacuum, when it is only space between the things, is not a wound. But on the fabric, the vacuum, as an appearance simulated of very empty (that of the being much more than that of space), is gaping in appearing it… Any bandage hides at the same time as it looks after and substitutes its perceptible appearance for nonthe appearance of the wound consequently opened for imaginary”. (article “Inimages”, Review of Esthetics, 1978).