Tableaux created in harmony with chaos

A century ago, cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were the first to captivate the art world with collage. It was an art of fragments in collision, disrupted surfaces, and bizarre juxtapositions that rattled the brain. Art has come a long way since then, but the insistently chaotic collage remains a prototype.

Varujan Boghosian, 85, has been making collages and their 3-D counterparts, assemblages, for decades. He has a show, mostly of collages, full of grace and harmony, at Victoria Munroe Fine Art. Although he employs visibly torn fragments, the rips and tears don’t feel aggressive. Rather, his fluid compositions add up to sly and surprising narratives.

Boghosian taught at Dartmouth College, where he came upon a volume of Audubon’s “The Birds of America’’ in the rare book library, and was struck by the swans. Many collages here feature prints of those images, which play up the extraordinary sinuous curve of the swans’ necks.

A hand-drawn head is the focus in “Self-Portrait With Swan.’’ It’s a generic drawing, but the artist has opened the cranium to release a galactic map that billows beyond the borders of the collage. The swan, a voluptuous lily, and a parade of beetles are the backdrop, suggesting the natural world, and a human tendency (such as Audubon’s) to put order to it.

The S-curve of the swan’s neck and the plump ballast of its body have a delicious sensuality. In “Swan and Serpent’’ the bird paddles and feeds along the surface of a strip of paper reverberating with curves. From between the seams of the backdrop, a grid of pale fabric, a muscular snake’s tail and head coil out right above the ignorant swan. It’s a picture stoked with threat, yet the echoes in the seductive curves of bird and reptile suggest kinship between predator and prey.