Artist Antoine Orand explores his chaotic side through collage

We wrote about Antoine Orand’s work last year, when the illustrator was busy making “poppy” comic illustrations under the moniker Claires Fontaines. Now, the artist, who is based between Brussels and Paris, has started working a new direction under the name Tas. Where Antoine’s Claires Fontaines work is linear, logical and slick, under his Tas (which means “stacks”) aesthetic, he rips up his own rule book. Pasting together his neatly executed illustrations with scraps of tap and daubs of brightly coloured paint, the effect is one of playful chaos.

“After my last comics attempt, Claires Fontaines,” Antoine tells us, "I felt the need to focus on the exhibition format, and it led specifically to the question of painting. Basically my practice was based on drawing, mainly of usual objects around me. The question was, how could I relate these drawings to the practice of painting? Tas collages are parts of that question. I am following a specific method: in the painting process, I consider a drawing not as a piece of art in itself, but as a material I have to manipulate. In that perspective, drawings become a kind of clay. I stack them, paint on them, cut, redraw, combine them, all these actions building something I ignore before finishing it. Then I use these collages as shapes that I paint on canvas, where I apply directly the same method of combination.
This practice is mainly focused on the “make”, avoiding a “too quickly found” finality.

“In that way, I think I may go further than what I could properly expect, so these Tas collages are both a part of the chain that leads me to paint, and elements containing the whole process of combination in itself. On the other hand, considered as a digital space, Tas is a visual archive fixing these collages in a specific time. Most of them already disappeared into new combinations that may occur on Tas. It is a stream of attempts that no longer exist anywhere else.”

Antoine recently exhibited his work at Entercourse of the new age, a Parisian project http://www.eotna.net/ which brought artists, photographers, graphic designers and illustrators together to create vinyl cover designs for rare 80s and 90s LPs. “For now, beside the publications that will come up with different publishers – Gloria Glitzer), Rollo Press) and Gargarismes – I plan to exhibit my current practice of painting. The first event will be an exhibition with a friend of mine, Mario Picardo, in the Parisian gallery P38 in April.”