Its gathering gesture corresponds to an exercise of the gaze and to a desire to think through each image. Without ruling out possible meanings that impregnate the fragments brought together here, the Collector is particularly interested in the questions arising from them and in new connections they establish with the whole. The diagrams it creates to explicate the genealogy of the themes are constantly undergoing transformation and being registered in their new configurations.
We could relate this act of gathering to the act of quoting. In his Le Travail de la Citation, Antoine Compagnon devoted a chapter to what he called "Ablation", which means to "remove forcefully": "When quoting, I extract, mutilate, and excise". When cutting out each image, the Collector seems to repeat this procedure, thus incurring an act of displacement that denies not only the context in which the photo was originally inserted, but also all temporal data related to it. Consequently, it builds just as many new potential interpretations through bringing together other fragments, creating associations and juxtapositions. Thus the image behaves as a quotation, underscoring ideas dear to the Collector that are related to urban space, its architectural impositions, and the counterpoint provided by landscape glimpsed through the flowers.
The newspaper as support is contaminated material, a repository of written and visual information that become part of its kernel, or body, through recycling. The images rescued by the Collector are survivors. However, given their fragility, and the yellowing and fading of the printed surface, they will always be inexorably doomed to waning, like any living being, or like the flowers shown on paper in this exhibition.