by Béa Aaronson

Collage is a serious artistic force, and a very demanding one too. Always searching for new materials to re-inhabit the impersonal surface of the paper or the canvas, or the wood panel. Scraps of time, unraveling memories, conscious or unconscious.

Because Collage is a self-discovery through imagery: "ce qui se voyait en moi" Ernst used to say. A psycho-analytic therapy which helps understand the process of becoming.

Thus, I infuse my world with animal, vegetal, mineral, human and non-figurative shapes. (I say "non-figurative" because there is no such thing as abstract. We call abstract what our naked eye cannot recognize. Indeed, with a telescope or a microscope we see an amazing spectacle of cellular or stellar cosmic realities.)

So, I create a mythical space, a mystical universe where everything is allowed to live and tell their stories, together, as Collage germinates with surprises, creates a fever of hieroglyphic shapes for the heart and the mind to decipher.

It takes hours, days, months, to cut out hundreds and thousands of shapes, small, very small, big, very big, bigger. Sometimes, I sort them by color, texture, subject matter, and I select the shape I want. Sometimes, I throw them into a big box, or onto the floor –my hands swim an ocean of floating images- and I randomly pick. Then, in an act of reparation, I try to create order out of chaos. I never know where I am going. It always changes. It is never the same... like life really. Collage liberates my creativity.

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Béa Aaronson was born in Paris. She is a self-taught multimedia artist (painter, sculptor, welder, collagist, photographer), a published poet, author, and art critic, an international lecturer and independent scholar, as well as a stage performer and movie actress.

She holds a Honors degree in History of Art, with a thesis on Gustave Moreau A Mystical World, an MA in French Literature with a thesis on Charles Baudelaire entitled Baudelaire Le Sang: Homopoeisis et Blessure, an essay on the symbolism of Blood and the Wound in The Flowers of Evil, and a PhD in Philosophy and Comparative Literature with a dissertation on Marcel Proust, The Bark and The Sap: A Midrashic Reading of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, focusing on the Jewish Kabalistic dimension of In Search of Lost Time.

She has published many essays, poems, articles, drawings, paintings and photographs in various magazines, journals and encyclopedias, such as Found Object in New York, Deus Loci in Baltimore, Tessera in Canada, The Review of Francophone Literature in Amsterdam, The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Jewish Writers in London, and Polyphony in Charleston. She published and illustrated her first book in 1998, Baudelaire-Miller Sexual Squalor in Paris, which is now the property of Harvard’s Private book collection.

bea_aaronson@hotmail.com
415 152 02 36

www.artlifebea.com
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