The Poetic Collision: The Art of Collage

Journal Entry: Saturday, February 15, 2025

Max Ernst, “The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses” (“La Biciclette graminée garnie de grelots les grisons grivelés et les échinodermes courbants l’échine pour quêter des caresses,” ca 1921), gouache, ink, and pencil on printed paper on paperboard, 29 1/4 x 39 1/4 in, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase, 1937 (photo by Robert Gerhardt, © 2017 Artists Rights Society/ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris)

The Poetic Collision: The Art of Collage

Collage is not merely an art form—it is an act of alchemy. At its core, collage transforms the unrelated into the extraordinary, bringing together fragments of disparate realities and forcing them into conversation. As the surrealist Max Ernst once described, it is “the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked encounter of two or more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane and the spark of poetry created by the proximity of these realities.” In short, bring two or more strangers together long enough for them to become companions.

This description captures the essence of what makes collage such a compelling medium. It thrives in the liminal space between the particular and the infinite, intention and accident. It’s an art form rooted in juxtaposition, in deliberately placing together elements that don’t belong—at least, not at first glance. A photograph from a 1950s science textbook sits alongside an abstract brushstroke. A torn fragment of a Renaissance painting overlaps with a bold typeface from a vintage advertisement. At first, these images are discordant, unrelated, even absurd. But when placed together, they create sparks of meaning—poetry born from their tension.

Collage speaks a visual language that thrives on layers. Each cutout, each element, carries its own history, its own story. A scrap of newspaper contains the echoes of an era; a piece of fabric evokes a sensory memory. By layering these fragments, the collage artist constructs something entirely new while honoring the remnants of the past. The result is often something uncanny: familiar yet strange, comforting yet unsettling.

This is where the magic happens. Collage doesn’t attempt to erase the individuality of its components. Instead, it celebrates their differences, trusting the viewer to make connections, to find the spark of poetry in the encounter. It asks us to lean into contradiction and irony, to embrace the unexpected, and to surrender to the tension between what we think we know and what we feel.

In many ways, collage mirrors the fragmented nature of modern existence. We live in a world inundated with images, words, and experiences, often unrelated and overwhelming in their abundance. Collage takes this cacophony and makes sense of it — or at least, it creates beauty from it. It challenges us to reconsider what belongs together, to find harmony in dissonance.

Collage also reflects our relationship with time. It pulls fragments from the past and places them in dialogue with the present. A Victorian portrait might share space with a splash of neon graffiti, collapsing history into a single, timeless plane. This temporal layering reminds us that meaning is never fixed—it is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, just like a collage.

Perhaps what makes collage so enduring is its ability to create that “spark of poetry” Max Ernst described. There’s something profoundly human in our desire to make connections, to find meaning in randomness. Collage offers us that opportunity. It invites us to look closer, to notice the relationships between unrelated realities. It doesn’t impose a single narrative but instead offers endless possibilities for interpretation.

Collage is both playful and profound. It toys with absurdity, but it also speaks to the complexity of existence. It’s a reminder that beauty and meaning often emerge from the unexpected, from the broken pieces, from the things we think don’t belong.

So the next time you encounter a collage, pause. Let yourself sit with the dissonance, the tension, the poetry. In that space, between what is and what could be, lies the true art of collage—the alchemy of transformation, the collision of realities, and the spark that lights the imagination.