Re-trait
As drawing, works on paper and animation are currently making a comeback in art, « Re-trait » explores the possible forms of a practice of drawing that does not resort to its traditional techniques yet retains its characteristics: simplicity, fragility, ephemerality. Alongside an evident repertory of classical forms – portrait, landscape, object, line or abstract form – the use of more unexpected media such as video, neon or performance to « draw » constitutes one of the issues dealt with in the project. The line, the movement, but also the structure or the mechanics of drawing are still present: they are simply displaced or revisited. Through poetic, conceptual, or formal approaches, the works outline what might turn into new momentum for drawing and make it possible to consider some questions from an original angle.
The renewal in media, formats, or techniques exemplified by the exhibited works also produces a novel experience of space, most notably through the permanence of the line, whether material or immaterial. The exhibition, which privileges a subjective point of view on the medium, does not intend to define what drawing is or is not, but rather when drawing occurs.
At the entrance of the exhibit, Irish artist Katie Holten has laid out her barked tree trunks, which seem to rise in one single black stroke towards the ceiling. Pierre Malphettes‘s nearby neon lighting, which figures the trajectory of La Chute d’une feuille morte (« The Fall of a Dead Leaf »), echoes Katie Holten‘s ghostly forest. In a less sculptural vein, Rainier Lericolais‘s glue drawings and Ulla von Brandenburg’s more cinematic cutouts and drawings cast a different look at drawing and its formal potential. They involve a physical relation to matter, space, and the spectator.
Returning from Chandigarh, Louidgi Beltrame superimposes the watermarked maps of two « drawn » cities and icons of urban modernity, Chandigarh and Brasilia, while Sylvain Rousseau blurs the notions of perspective with a « sculpture painting » that appears like an architect’s plan laid flat. Bojan Sarcevic‘s video Miniatures initiates a different relation to the city: the action is seen from the seat of a car driver and draws geometric forms, like a pattern of the city, onto his steamed up windshield.
Brasilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain turn the invisible into the visible and revisit Braille to create their own three-dimensional alphabet. In his more abstract approach to drawing, young artist Benoît Maire raises the issue of the place of this art in the elaboration of thought and concepts. In an excerpt from his video Meeting S. Planchard the philosopher can thus be seen demonstrating a theory by sketching a diagram illustrating his thinking. Set down discreetly in a corner, Maire‘s second intervention Lacane is both graphic and intriguing and turns out to refer to the Derridean postulate that « No drawer can see. » In a new work, Pierre Bismuth invites spectators to experience drawing by themselves through an interactive setup inspired from some psychological tests.
With very simple means and actions the Abraham Poincheval – Laurent Tixador duo as well as Koki Tanaka explore the relations between drawing and performance, taking the landscape as the ground for their experimentations and echoing Francis Alÿs very poetic interventions. Finally, Jonathan Borofsky‘s Telephone Drawing and Robert Breer’s Floor Drawing take us back to the pioneering experiments of the 1970s, which confront the current developments of drawing with their humor and their irony.
