(With thanks to Owen Fenton)

Ostensibly, the  Art on the covers of San-Antonio paperback books captures moments in time. The 1950’s and 1960’s illustrations by famous artist Michel Gourdon (1925-2011) are archive images of these distant times.  They look even more distant in Owen Fenton’s  collage.  There, masked liked diapositives, framed like Kodak photographs,  they form the  rough shape of a representation of the United States reminiscent of Jasper Jones.   They are precisely composed candid photographs of the myths and archetypes of their epoch,  ideologically charged celebrations of the  consumers society. If  they are magic for us now, it is for  their ability to  re-present a past that never truly existed, outside of them.