André Stas
André Stas (1949-2023)
André Stas. Laughing at everything, resolutely!
A prolific collagist, Stas deals with all kinds of subjects, be they political, literary, erotic, dreamlike or artistic. He masters the art of unearthing old illustrations, accumulating advertising leaflets, popular or serious daily newspapers, fashion or pornographic magazines. His art of collage displays a remarkable meticulousness and sense of composition, integrating streams of words and puns. Stas’s humor is generally black, with derision and subversion his watchwords. It emanates a bitter-sweet irony, to which his perpetual smirk testified that it was indeed a genuine principle of life.
In his collages, André Stas likes to use the serial approach, that of oversized brains teeming with a thousand elements, the “I like” or “I don’t like” approach. Drawing on a wide range of artistic and cultural sources, Stas has also revisited the Buddhist and Hindu art of the mandala. Ars Longa Vita Brevis Mandala and this Mandala du Décervelage from the collections of the Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Liège (a reference to the “Chanson du Décervelage” by Alfred Jarry, creator of Père Ubu and initiator of ‘Pataphysique, “the science of imaginary solutions”). Circles, grouped around a square, made up of various motifs arranged side by side, form a kind of kaleidoscope that the viewer has fun breaking down to discover each element.
Stas also enjoys revisiting the great masters, triturating and diverting. In the collage How many times and with whom?Greco’s portrait of Cardinal Fernando de Guevara is reworked in Francis Bacon’s style, replacing the face with sexual penetration. The work is also part of a series entitled Dickheads. Vulgarity, even obscenity, does not displease the humorist.
André Stas’ collages are internationally renowned, but he is also the author of several collections of aphorisms. A writer, poet, visual artist and illustrator, his work Between the pears and the false magi received the Grand Prix de l’humour noir Xavier-Forneret in 2009. After studying Romance philology at the University of Liège, which he completed with a dissertation on the aphorism, Stas gave up teaching in the late 70s, preferring counter-culture. André Blavier (editor of René Magritte’s Écrits complets, author of the encyclopedia Les fous littéraires, and friend of Raymond Queneau) steered him towards the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, where, in the spirit of this society dedicated to Jarry, he was later granted the title of “Regent of the Chaire Fondamentale de Travaux Pratiques d’Aliénation Mentale”.
His first exhibition took place in Liège in 1970, at the Yellow gallery. He soon rubbed shoulders with the still-active members of surrealism in Belgium, including Louis Scutenaire, Irène Hamoir, Marcel Mariën, Tom Gutt and Claudine Jamagne, and contributed to the group’s various publications. In Liège in the 1970s, he and Michel Antaki co-founded the Cirque Divers, a hotbed of Liège irreverence, and programmed exhibitions with painter Jean-Pierre Ransonnet. He would later become one of the artist-animators of Créahm/MadMusée. His encounter with the work of Georges Perec was to prove decisive, and as an artist and writer, he multiplied his collaborations with Arrabal, Roland Topor, Jacques Charlier, Noël Godin, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, Glen Baxter and many others. Shortly before his death, he published a collection of aphorisms at La Pierre d’Alun, illustrated by Benjamin Monti.
Emmanuelle Sikivie Art historian/Special assistant La Boverie