Untitled (Hand montage)

Maurice Tabard's use of photomontage is nearly without exception a tool for layering corporeal images over each other in ambiguous spaces, as if the photograph itself were merely a staging area for ghostlike bodies to float in. While often playful and sometimes mildly erotic, his work makes use of the disembodiment of human features that secures him squarely in the Surrealist trend of the time. (See: L'Amour Fou, Photography and Surrealism, pp. 80-83 and 234, 235). It is interesting to note that in an exhibition devoted to the Spanish poet, dramatist and painter, Federico García Lorca on the centennial of his birth, the Tabard photograph offered here was included, tying García Lorca to the avant-garde of the period.

Perhaps this particular image was chosen for the way it portends the advent of Franco's Spain with its dark hand of fate descending upon the literature and homes of the poet's countrymen. García Lorca himself was murdered by Franquist soldiers, gunned down in a cemetary in Grenada. His body has never been recovered.