“The majority of my works that deal with lettering forms originally started out as a Fluxus idea, and that idea was to create compositions out of randomly chopped up lettering and then reconstruct an abstract 'poem' from the parts. I wanted something that frees the words and letters from their practical use as bearers of literary meaning allowing them to function on a purely visual and concrete level."– Cecil Touchon

Cecil Touchon’s paintings are called Post Dogmatist Paintings and start with the prefix PDP and then followed by a number which is the sequential number of the painting in this long standing series of works. The numbering system began in the 1980s and Touchon has maintained it throughout his career since that time. The paintings shown here are all in the typographic abstraction style using collages from the Fusion Series as studies or as Touchon says, as scores, in the Fluxus sense of the term. As a score, Touchon sees the studies as the original visual instructions according to which the paintings are composed as performances. As in music, a score is an instruction for how the work is to be performed by musicians. In Fluxus tradition a score, known as an ‘event score‘, is usually an open ended and often minimal instruction for fluxus performers who might have wildly different interpretations depending on who is performing the piece and what the prevailing circumstances are. Scores can be performed over and over again and each is a little different and hence a unique iteration or interpretation of the score. Touchon, on occasion, will make new iterations of the same collage composition to explore the image in different scales, different color schemes or using different techniques and so, while the progression of the works in collage will proceed along its own trajectory, Touchon will look back over the entire series of collage works and pick any particular one that he wishes to perform as a painting. There is often no connection chronologically between the creation of the original collage work and when it might be performed as a painting. For instance, a collage might have been made in 2001 but not produced as a painting until 2017 or perhaps a painting was made at a small scale and then, years later, at a larger scale. Paper is almost always used as a substrate for the paintings to allow Touchon to maintain the ‘feel’ of collage in the paintings. In recent years, Touchon has also been making collages on small to medium sized canvases or panels and they remain in the PDP series.

MOMA – New York, NY MOMA Library Manhattan, New York, NY Emily Harvey Foundation – New York, NY Museu Brasileiro da Escultura - San Paulo, Brazil Mela Foundation, New York, NY Studio One, New York, NY (Yoko Ono) Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Fogg Museum of Art Archive, Cambridge, Mass. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Research Library, Los Angeles, Ca The Getty Research Institute - Los Angeles, Ca Modern Realism, San Francisco, Ca Chicago Art Institute – Chicago, Il. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Il. Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Il. Saint Louis Art Museum, Library, Saint Louis, Mo Iowa State University - Fluxus Collection - Ames, IA ATCA Special Collections, Iowa State University, Iowa City, Iowa Avant Writing Collection - Rare Books & Manuscripts Library - at Ohio State University Ohio State University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscript Libraries, Columbus, Ohio Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami, Fl Ontological Museum, Fluxus Collections, Fort Worth, Texas Longview Museum and Art Center – Longview, Texas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Mn The Tate Modern – London, UK Tate Britain (Archive), London, UK Museum Fluxus + - Potsdam, Germany Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, Hungary TAM Archive, Breda, Netherlands