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2003
drawing:installation
mixed media on paper
180 drawings, 32 x 24 cm each
Derek Eller Gallery, New York City, US
In the installation, realized for an exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, drawings in different techniques and of various motifs but identical in size are mounted as a solid block. Some of the drawings are based on photographic originals, the first time such sources were used. In addition to moiré patterns of superimposed brushstrokes, which, as a sort of signal for a transmitter breakdown, for the loss of the image, constitute a steadily recurring motif, graphic realizations of gestural brushstrokes transformed, by the insertion of eyes, into faces, grimaces, and abstract drawings, there is a heterogeneous multitude of motifs captured in photographs and then reproduced in drawings: architectonic elements, stackable plastic chairs, a shower hose, faces isolated and involved in situations, an open refrigerator, paintings photographed in museums, recent press pictures (from the run-up to the Iraq war, whose beginning coincided with the opening of the exhibition), etc. The translation of these motifs into the drawings proceeds in accordance with various sets of rules, but it is always ‘digital’ in that it transforms the photographic motif into a dichromatic pattern of black or blue and white. In most cases, a defined grid such as an irregular coarse-grained structure of blots or a system of horizontal stripes is in play. The continuous figure of the motif is thus disintegrated into a binary pattern that remains tied to the surface of the drawing’s material realization. The blind of such stripes, the litter of such blots offers fractured access to the space of the motif and, more importantly, its time. In contrast with the drawings not based on photographs, these pictures render the fact conspicuous that photography integrates any motif, even the silent and motionless one, into a minimal narrative—a narrative whose irreducible temporal parameter is the exposure time itself, in which the ‘appearance’ of the motif inscribes itself as an event. Narrated time is thus amalgamated with the time of the production of the image. It is this amalgamation, the integration of represented time and the time of production, and not an unsurpassable likeness, that constitutes the naturalism of the photographic image. This naturalism is fractured by the translation into the drawing, which ties the space of time of the photographic image back to the time and space of the production of the drawing. What emerges is a form of heterogeneity that ruptures the virtually organic character of the free drawings, in which the space of the motif—which originates in a pictorial intention rather than a technologically generated original—and the movement of the drawing lend themselves to immediate integration. By making reference to photographically captured motifs, invasion thus expands the artist’s motivic and technical-formal vocabulary and adapts the old medium of the drawing to a perception that, rather than generating its own images in a natural environment, is now informed by images produced and reproduced by mass media and thus put into a new state of passivity and apathy.