Massimiliano Gioni: "Collage is a dirty medium, infected as it is by waste. It appropriates residues and leftovers, trafficking with what is deemed to be valueless. Its origins are more than modest — they are almost sordid and impure, for collage feeds off the pollution of visual culture. Collage casts its roots into a lower, inferior realm, as it scavenges through dark matters and seedy places."
"The first cubist collages described squalid still lives that immediately evoked the settings of bars at closing time or the corners of badly lit artists' studios, where objects were abandoned to rot away in the darkness. Old chairs, broken bottles, cigarette packs, tablecloths, and torn newspapers: the iconography of early collages was profoundly connected to the mythology of the café as a space of transgression and to the domestic perimeter of the studio where artists lived according to a careless, bohemian lifestyle. Since its very first appearance, then, collage has chronicled the birth of a new culture of both social and ethical mobility, an age of restlessness propelled by a new sense of immediacy and synchronicity. With its generous embrace of chaos and its participation in the polyphonic explosion of city life at the beginning of the century, collage has represented a joyful urge to both lay waste and recuperate the resulting debris; it is an art that has incarnated a tension between dissipation and conservation."
"As the early twentieth century discovered the power of images and photography, artists felt the urge to reconfigure this amorphous mass of anomic images by creating connections, links, possible narratives, sudden clashes, and interpretations. It was an attempt to make sense of the world, to structure it, while still preserving its absurdly cacophonic, at times sublime, multiplicity."