La Cage et l’Amour de papier 2016

Sandra Chevrier made this mixed media artwork, La Cage et l’Amour de papier, combining painting with collaged comic book fragments. The artist uses oil paint to render the woman's face with detailed brushstrokes, conveying a photographic realism in monochrome, while the overlaid comic book art presents a stark contrast. These vibrant, mass-produced images are cut and pasted, disrupting the painted surface, and creating a textured, layered effect. Chevrier takes these icons of American consumer culture and repurposes them, integrating them into a commentary on contemporary identity. The juxtaposition of the hand-painted portrait and the mass-produced comics creates a tension between the unique and the replicated. It also raises questions about the ways in which images infiltrate our emotions, and how we understand production, labor, politics and consumption in our modern world. Chevrier's work ultimately challenges the traditional boundaries between fine art and craft by elevating the status of everyday materials.