Cecil Touchon

Born in Austin, Texas, artist and poet Cecil Touchon earned a BFA in art at the University of Texas at Arlington. In his visual poetry, he deconstructs found language by dismantling text from open sources such as spam e-mail or street posters into sub-letter units and reassembling the results as visual collage, which Touchon then replicates into paintings using trompe l’oeil techniques. In his artist’s statement, Touchon speaks of this practice as “liberating the forms of language from the practical utility of being carriers of some commercially driven corporate message, allowing them to exist purely for their own sake as shapes, curves, rhythms and colors.” Touchon cofounded the International Post-Dogmatist Group, and his work has been associated with the Fluxus and Massurrealist schools.

His books include The Art of Collage: Selected Works on Paper (2010) and Happy Shopping: Massurrealist Spam Poetry (2007). Touchon has edited numerous anthologies, including The Spam Poetry Game: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2009), Natural Born Fluxus: Childhood Event Scores by Fluxus Artists (2009), and The Cut & Paste Poets: An Anthology of Collage Poetry (2008).

Touchon is the founding director of the Fluxmuseum and the Ontological Museum of the International Post Dogmatist Group. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.