John Stezaker

The most confident and playful exhibition on display in Manchester (UK) at the moment is the relatively simple twenty or so collages by John Stezaker at the Whitworth.

Often the collages are grouped according to formal or spatial consistencies in the end results. In one grouping anatomical studies are spliced, juxtaposed and cojoined into hybrid creatures of the front and back of torsos. More frequently his raw materials are an archival accumulation of studio portraits of B-movie actors, old postcards and promotional film stills, the outdatedness of the source material immediately giving an otherworldliness to the pieces adding to their pictorial strangeness.

So profile shots and full on portraits (both male and female) are cut and jigsawed into almost feasibly coherent wholes deformed by spatial inconsistencies. Rectangular areas of nature or geological illustrations cover areas of faces but horizon lines or the sinuous line of a tree follows the features of the face. These act as a window into an alternative reality but seem to echo the dynamics of the portraits formal construction and the relations between figures.

Stezaker’s considered cuts and excisions are not merely second-hand techniques and devices lifted from early Cubist collages and Surrealists games, although these influences are clearly present. They allow images to telescope into layered depths and for shadows to be sandwiched into static forms.

The drag and flow of suggested cinematic narratives are held static for a forensic looping by the viewers eye literally through and into the image’s component parts. And although a simple collages construction takes very little time this stands in stark opposition to the time needed to conceptually digest the static implications of these spatial games.

The pieces actually work as physical statements of a stubborn refusal of the badgering directive and authoritarian flow of meaning in contemporary visual media, the didactic nature of that which claims to be a democratisation of communicative potentials.