Cecil Touchon’s art and poetry stem from his interest in the modernist history of abstraction and his belief that language and commercially designed objects are too often relegated to purely functional roles. In his poetry, Touchon takes fragments of language from sources like spam email, manipulating them into purely aesthetic sounds and arrangements. Following the same principles, his collages and paintings deconstruct shapes derived from the Central Mexican landscape or architecture into abstractions. His work builds on the ideas of modernist artists and poets who sought to reduce painting and collage to its essence and create a new visual language.