Through the Looking-Glass is the title of a novel by Lewis Carroll, in which Alice enters a fantastical world by climbing through a mirror. There she finds that, just like a reflection in a mirror, everything is reversed. In the same way, this series of collages shift the viewer’s focus, from the main subject towards the colored background. By reclaiming fragments of backgrounds from advertising and various visual sources, these works aim to investigate the other side of our visual culture, permeated by commerce, in order to return their original force to the colors used to attract the eye to the page.
From these color scraps, the artist builds compositions that open the door to an imaginary architecture, juxtaposing different thicknesses, textures, and styles of printed color, while embedding multiple hidden references to art history – abstraction, but also design and visual culture. Like Alice facing the mirror, the viewer might think they are paintings or drawings, but will discover upon closer examination that these works are, in fact, collages, made from found paper from the fifties to our present day. The title is also a playful homage to the Studiolo space, a storefront gallery shaped like a window, that entices the viewer to draw closer to the glass panel in order to discover the world waiting on the other side.