This book collects in their entirety 17 series of collages that Arturo Herrera made in 2011 and 2012. In the strong narrative thrust they develop page by page, interspersed with two essays and an artist conversation that offer the necessary reflection, this book like no other allows you to delve into Herrera’s interventions with a scissors, glue, and paint brush. “The aim of collage is to juxtapose a variety of fragments,” he explains, “that have their own rich references to create a new image.”
Since the images are reproduced sheet by sheet, varying between 2 and 28 elements, you can read them as they thematically evolve. Some sheets are like a dense jumble of torn-up motifs, some have pasted-over color fields in almost musical composition, and often the material used will still permeate the work like a theme: an old textbook of techniques for real-life self defense, or a child’s exercise book whose marginal drawings hint at a Leonardo in the making, amplified by Herrera’s off-topic additions. On the way, we not just become engaged with the story each series seems to revolve around, but also with collage as a way of seeing things in a new light. As the artist himself puts it here: “Collage is our portrait of life rearranged and reordered.”