C’est du Joli!
art zine, Boris Paillard, 24 pgs, [email protected], € 16.50
Photomontages are a delicate art, with tenuous balance needing to be found. Let the images be too contrasting, and the final image loses the feeling of unity. Let the images not complement each other enough, and you get a similar effect. Thankfully, the work in C’est du Joli! effectively finds that balance.
No two montages in the zine are quite alike. A child with a bus for a head runs freely through the woods. Later, a man with the face of a bullrider (literally) goes for a swig from their flask. There is no real rhyme or reason to the work, but there is a consistency to much of it. Nature meets with technology, or a figure is melded with something (or at times someone) wholly unlike them. A family watches television over a backdrop of a city in flames. You get it.
There’s something jarring about the work in C’est du Joli!, and Paillard seems to understand that. It’s when we see what we’re comfortable with fused with the unknown that we begin to ask questions, to seek answers. Given the content of the zine, the title, translated to mean, “It’s Pretty!” may be tongue-in-cheek, but when you look a bit longer, maybe it’s earnest. C’est du Joli! It certainly is.