Auroque.zine

Idea: Real Scale Drawings of Buildings Made in a Parking Lot

2016-09-02T19:44:00.001+01:00

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

To help visualize is an art on its own. Whom have already had in hands the drawings of a project (of a house, a bicycle or any given industrial piece) knows the effort it takes to project himself into the future and see how the final object will look like. But if one hand the author of the project already has a certain predisposition to imagine how will it be (after all the project might be fruit of his imagination), on the other hand to transmit such image to another person – a client, for instance – than the question changes its figure.

For the architecture office Vardehaugen, based in Oslo, Norway, the solution is somewhat simple. This team of architects resorts to a low tech and elemental method to visualize and simulate the fruition of the spaces they project, using chalk and duct tape to make in the parking lot floor real scale drawings of future buildings.

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

Indeed, for any architect, the ability of visualizing the what’s yet unbuiltis an important part of the trade, so much to evaluate as to experiment an communicate solutions. However, the difficulty resides in transmitting the sense of scale and size of the projected spaces through the conventional 3D visualization techniques (be it digital renderings or scaled models). To overcome that obstacle, or at least to minimize it, Vardehaugen, in a written presentation of its working process, states that "[we] conduct real scale drawings in our back yard, to ensure a greater understanding of size and proportions in our projects. This enable us to simply take a stroll through our projects and get a sense of dimensions and spatial sequences, – even before they are built."

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

“The body is architecture’s conduct” wrote visionary architect Neil Spiller (previously). Therefore, architecture is something that is intimately related with our bodily experience. And it’s that experience, with the sense of space and proportion, size and scale, that opens up the door to architectural possibilities.

Film: Mirror in Mind

2016-08-31T10:37:00.000+01:00

A woman looks into her own mind, confronting herself with the ideologies that inhabit around her. A stop motion animation movie by korena artist Seunghee Kim.

Film: Miss Hokusai

2016-08-30T19:55:00.000+01:00

Miss Hokusai movie poster

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) is better known for his ukyio-e work, the japanese woodblock printing technique. One of his best known works is The Great Wave off Kanegawa.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanegawa (from The Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji series), 1826 - 1833.

His work is regarded has one of the major influences on western art from the 19th century's second half - such as Impressionism and Art Noveau - being collected by several renown artists of that period.

In this animation movie directed by Keiichi Hara, launched in 2015, the life of Hokusai is told as seen by the eyes of his daughter, herself an artist, overshadowed by her father.

Neil Spiller: an Architect Between Project and Art

2016-08-25T00:01:00.000+01:00

Museum of Docklands, 1986. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

The first time I came across Neil Spiller’s work was on a small end-of-the-day lecture, given by Spiller himself, as the program complementary part of a short course on drawing. The oratory and the graphics of that lecture were undoubtedly familiar but with sufficient je ne sais quoi of uncommon that obliged a doubled attention in order to actually understand its contents. Except for the place where the lecturer presented his work, the small conference room was immersed in semi obscurity. With a serene posture and a subtle humor – but without ever laughing – Neil Spiller unraveled the rosary of truths, ironies and sarcasms of his career, with references to the people and key-moments linked to the drawings that illuminated on a big white screen behind him. The speech would foment an clipped ambience of giggles and laughs coming from the audience, while on the big white screen were projected images of drawings executed in paper, with lines sometimes precise, of an irreprehensible technicality, other times free, as freehand drawing; traces of an exact fineness alongside with others of necessary thickness; stains and shadings that range from inky blacks to shining greys; in some drawings, the marks made on the paper give form to a more or less familiar while in others to some that the audience recognize as an object of some sort but which scale doesn’t become immediately self-evident; in others still, the drawings would appear as something absolutely abstract. Eventually, the lecturer would abandon his post towards the screen and pointed out this or that image detail to accompany his dissertation, identifying one or other less evident technical nomenclature. In spite of the abundant artistic dimension, and overcome the apparent strangeness, the work shown on the big white screen could after all be seen and classified as architectural drawing. Yet, to reduce Neil Spiller’s work production (individually or in collaboration with other artist and architects) to a set of artistic properties or a set of architectural project techniques would be too simplistic. It’s hard to synthesize and encompass under one single category all his imaginative and symbolic production, all of its semiotic content, being undeniable the contribution of this prolific architect to the discussion of drawing and architecture contemporary practices and paradigms.

Neil Spiller is Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, having been before that Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at that same university. Prior to that he was Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Design, University College London. Neil spiller is also known for having directed in 2004 the foundation of the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) Group, now based at University of Greenwich. This group has its own Masters and PhD programs and conducts research into advanced technologies of architectural representation, with special focus on the research of the impact of new technologies such as virtuality and biotechnology in the 21st century design. Neil Spiller and the AVATAR Group are recognized by its contribution to paradigm shifting of architectural discourse, research, experimentation and teaching. And in that context Spiller believes that “[design] tutors are creative midwives that help deliver students’ individual work that is influenced by the past but not in thrall to it” (Spiller).

Aligned with this artist work are extemporary predecessors such as Giovanni Piranesi, Etienne-Louis Boulee (both from the 18th), Hermann Finsterlin (more recent, born in 1887), or the collaborative duo Alexander Brodski and Uliya Utkin (that belonged to the surnamed “paper architects”) and contemporary others, such as Lebbeus Woods, constituting major references of the so called visionary architecture. This most unconventional and experimental visionary architecture is relativized by two almost paradoxical perceptions: one in which the notion of impossible to build edifications is inexistent; and the other in which the edifications will hardly be habitable or functionalized by human beings in spite they are thought as such. Although Neil Spiller’s drawings seem absolutely utopic, the edifications projected by him only look like so just because there isn’t any financing source eccentric enough to support such construction endeavor. His works come from the architectural project prescriptions genesis but it merges on the artistic work. In the end, that could be the love-hate relation, a mixt of stigma/triumph, of the visionary architecture with the artistic product. In fact, such works – or projects? – live on that possible/impossible duality that makes this form of architecture may only dwell in the paper. In a way to concretely and physically construct what Neil Spiller projects (also valid for the other visionary architects) would annihilate the architect-artist vision. Let’s agree: certain things, certain visions, only hold their magic if they never leave the paper (many times even in the embryonic state of the sketch or the preliminary study). Interesting fact on Neil Spiller’s work is that he subverts the normalization technique itself for architectural drawing presentation. The project visualization keeps the typical nomenclatures – elevations, cuts, axonometric views, exploded views, extrusions – but it requires some imagination exercise so one may experience the concretization of civil construction in question. In fact, the nomenclatures are there, yes, but may not be what an well advised observer when it comes to the good rules of the craft might expect (see Drawing for a new AA School project, e.g., or Museum of Docklands).

One can observe how since Dean Street (and even Drawing for a new AA School project) the most identifiable and orthodox architectural drawings gradually transmute into project graphics more and more autonomous under an artistic perspective, in spite they never lose sight (literally) of project’s drawing and the idea of an authentic materialization. It won’t be necessary to be a in-depth connoisseur to intuit that drawing and architecture have a long history of partnership, of inherence, of complicity even. However, the possibility for drawing to acquire a certain autonomy from what is foreseen to be built holds in itself a great power. It’s drawings that could be edifications but that probably never will, because of the eccentricity of the endeavor as much of the drawn work autonomy. And yet, both conditions hold the art work manifestation as they subject themselves to the multiple readings of who observe them. The literalness of those readings is a dichotomy: more liberating when the project, still on paper, is voted to utopia or more evident when the drawing is thought as an edification to be built (if it wasn’t for its eccentricity size make of it an almost nullity from the usability point of view). Here, definitely, form doesn’t follow function. It’s not rare therefore to find architects that practically abandoned the idea of drawing as a project tool and embraced the exclusive potentiality of drawing as a valence in itself. Anyway, and under the light of the advents of art history since modernism to contemporaneity, this kind of creative work brings us new ways of seeing and doing, new ways of experiencing and exercise our relation with architecture and drawing. Drawing is shown to us once more in its dimension of support for the process of imagination and architectural concretization and in the way we communicate those faculties. The work of Neil Spiller is therefore a great contribute to the critical mass of contemporary drawing practice evolution and the exploration of its paradigms. The work Velasquez Machine reflects even a certain preoccupation with that contribute, not in absolute to drawing, but to art in general. For Neil Spiller it was since Velasquez (1599) that artists begun to be more and more narcissistic, in which they themselves are simultaneously the subject and the object of their art works (see the examples of Tracey Emin or Nan Goldin, major names of contemporary art). The preoccupation with the position of narcissism within contemporary art is patent in this architectural object: through the subversion of a narcissist manifesto Velasquez Machine refers to the author’s interest in putting into evidence the “straddle [of] representation and abstraction, a critical perturbation in the history of art” (Spiller). However, Neil Spiller preoccupations go well beyond than art’s elemental concepts.

Since its beginnings that Neil Spiller makes attempts to introduce narrative in architectural work. If on one hand the idea isn’t new, on the other hand the narrative has disappeared form the architectonic program since modernism, due to is attitude of “sanctity of functions and programme” (Spiller). The intention of this architect when it comes to narrative becomes self-evident even in his early works (as in Drawing for a new AA School project) and is extended to the more recent works such as Millennium Pavillion. Millennium Pavillion shows that notion of edification as a metaphor or narrative in which a series of events lead by the eventual user build up the building’s function. For Neil Spiller society conforms the body – the body is architecture’s conduct. As the body gets modified, so does the architectural possibilities. “Architecture will have to respond at a variety of new scales, some microscopic, others cosmoscopic” (Spiller).

Communicating Vessels it’s probably Neil Spiller’s most paradigmatic work. Communicating Vessels was initiated in 1998 and continued until today as a body of work in research on architecture’s design. In this work there are two research foci: in one of them is reiterated the influence of several human scientific production areas (the biotechnology, the virtual and the nanotechnology) in architecture, namely in “relation to the old dichotomy between architecture and landscape” (Spiller); the other research focus constitutes itself in the approach of the architecture paradigms that seek new spatial arrangements more appropriate to our time. Neil Spiller says that that “by looking to some of the spatial tactics of the Dadaists, Pataphysicists(1), Surrealists, Situationists, OuLiPo(2) and the Symbolists, we can gain an insight into new spatial arrangements […] that are appropriate for our time” (Spiller) as an authentic metaphor for the counterculture within the progression of contemporary art itself. This research project is now over 250 drawings and thousands of words in prose and theorethical explanation. As land in sight navigation, this work’s process strips itself gradually off the technical and, why not saying it, sacrosanct architectural constraints to constitute itself towards an art work, assuming however that dimension of a project that at its genesis it’s an architectural one (always in the presence of the preoccupation with the spatial planking that conform architecture).

Who seeks illustration in the world Neil Spiller created will be profoundly disappointed, it’s a vain task. “A good scheme and drawing must have enigmas, a certain elbow room to allow further speculative re-reading” (Spiller). His drawings are complex and formulate equally complex thoughts. Lebbeus Woods wrote on Neil Spiller:

“For Neil Spiller, drawing is thinking. He does not ‘express’ thoughts already formulated […]. Rather, he formulates thoughts through drawing, indeed by drawing. […] We feel, upon entering the drawings, as though we have found an entire world, whose exploration will take us away from our familiar one, but eventually bring us back to it, our perceptions enriched, our imaginations stimulated and expanded, the better to appreciate the familiar in new ways.”

Drawing for a new AA School project,in Covent Garden. Interior Perspective: Life; 1985. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

Millenium Pavillion, 1996. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

The Object Beside Itself (Communicating Vessels), 1998. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

Velasquez Machine, 2002. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

Dean Street,1985. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]

To know more about Neil Spiller’s work:

www.neilspiller.com

[AVATAR Group]

www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk

lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com

(1) Pataphysics: pataphysics is a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions; it was created by Alfred Jarry (1873) who defined it as "a science of imaginary solutions and the of laws that regulate exceptions".

(2) OuLiPo: Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle which can be roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature". Is a loose gathering of (mainly) french-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques (http://oulipo.net/).

Almost Everything for Giorgio Griffa

2016-08-01T16:20:00.000+01:00

Oblíque, 1976. Tinta acrílica obre tela.

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is exhibiting an anthology of drawings and paintings from Giorgio Griffa. Presented by the first time in Portugal the exhibition shows this artist’s work that spans from 1969 to 2015.
His work inscribes itself in the group of works whose authors had sought the elemental nature of things and in doing so they’ve based their artistic practice in the utopias of a reencounter with a lost innocence. For Giorgio Griffa, the process of disassembling painting is a method for knowledge deepening. He disassembles painting in its essential components until he reaches the lower substrates, arriving to the point of intercrossing the elements of painting with the elements of drawing. In a way this methodology can be enclosed in the 1960’s avant-gardist wish (the time by which Griffa began his work) of redefining the artistic disciplines and practices. Nevertheless, Giorgio Griffa avoids this and other streams of that time (like arte povera with which he was greatly connoted) not being classified into none but drinking from all of it.
With assumed gestural or performative emphasis, Griffa applies the colors in a brute fashion onto the unprepared and unframed canvas which is the equally exposed without frame nor physical framing. The dimensions of the paintings (draperies…) vary, only assuming ensemble configurations to ease any interpretation (e. g., a drapery that has been painted and cut into sections, to be exposed side by side in order to suggest some sort of continuity). The applied acrylic colors, watercoloured, gain more joy as his work evolves over the decades. They began by being applied like monosyllables over the raw cloth, as if it was to teach some very own alphabet, in which the colors indicate the tone. The magentas, the blues and the reds appear, somewhat fainted by their origins as well as by the time. Later on, by his latest works, the forms become more complex and the vivid yellows, the vivid reds, the oranges and the purples appear. Nevertheless, what stands out in Griffa’s work it’s in fact the gesture with which the colors are applied. There can be seen obliques (traces), coarse but uniform dots, arabesques and, later on, numbers and letters. Most of the canvases are filled predominantly by left, as it was started there and then evolving towards right. It’s like it was a unconscious faint allusion to the signs of writing. Reinforcing this allusion it can be observed that in many cases, in the progression of the pictorial matter from left to right, the canvas far part of the right or the lower part of this one is left blank. Beyond reinforcing the writing practice reminiscence this way of making the pictorial matter prograde on the canvas is as if it indicates the limited character of the human cognition and search for knowledge: it an ever incomplete quest. It’s also the formal response of the artist to a wish of immediacy and an interest on the performative dimension of painting, both inspired by zen philosophy.
What stands out in Griffa’s work it’s the similarity of his paintings with drawing practice in its condition of thought support. Moreover, at the exhibition, there are also drawings in paper that are like a transition link between the idea and the painting instead of constituting sketches in the strict sense . In the drawings, ideas and notions are introduced to be after explored in the larger format paintings. Paintings therefore continue the work that begun with drawing instead of settling on it, which in a way contributes to the decomposition in painting elements that converge in decomposition of drawing elements. Besides, drawings are what he calls the “intimate laboratory” where he researches the memory primordial depot that are the signs .
In an interview for the Contemporary Art Museum of Serralves, Griffa admits that his work it’s more a thinking development before it’s formal one. “I don’t portrait anything, I paint” are the words of Giorgio Griffa himself. For him painting is a problem of substance, of background knowledge . And to confirm it are his works on the golden ratio, that in a way has this je ne sais quoi of naive (Griffa is an artist, not a scientist…). Yet, the decomposition in the elements of painting doesn’t only serve the search for a background knowledge. It is, according the artist, a process of deep and collective knowledge. His method seeks the memory of painting immanent in the signs of 30 or 40 thousand years ago and that is present in the memory of everyone. “The intelligence of matter” is an expression used by Griffa to introduce the notion that even himself is part of a global condition of artistic production. He creates the work of art not because of his will but in the following of a dialogue with the substrate of the work, being it the painting canvas, the drawing paper or the sculpture stone.
In order not get astray from his route in his search development, Giorgio Griffa helps himself with some references: his early 80’s cycle of works entitled “Alter Ego” it’s a mix of dedications, homages and thefts of works from Matisse, Klein, Beuys, Klee, Tintoretto, Paolo Uccello, Piero d’Orazio, Anselmo and Agnes Martin . Griffa struggles with the “formal cage” (another of his expressions) which by its counterpart and paradoxically gives him a great freedom to deepen his search for knowledge, as if it was “a second youth”.
The drawing-painting bipolarity in the work of Giorgio Griffa fades way as his work evolves. His considerations about distancing from the “formal cage” lead him towards one of the drawing practice fundamentals: the reencounter between thought, gesture and observation. What makes this artist’s work so interesting is precisely this condition of seek, of research, transposed to an artistic practice that has no ambition of having a substance other than form. Griffa tries to show that it’s also up to painting a dimension of search for knowledge. He calls upon painting properties that – more by tradition than by concept, one must say – are conditioned to drawing practice.

The showing will be on until 4 September 2016. More information at Serralves.

Horizontal Lines, 1973. Acrylic on canvas.

On the Left, 1969. Acrylic on canvas.

Paper, 1968. Pastel on paper.

Three Lines and an Arabesque n.º 64, 1991. Tempera and pastel on paper.

Three Lines and an Arabesque n.º 30, 1991. Tempera and pastel on paper.

Golden Ratio 820, 2014. Watercolour on paper.

Golden Ratio 803, 2015. Watercolour on paper.

Paper, 1989. Pencil, watercolour and indian ink on paper.

Fotografias by Rogério Guimarães.

Serge Bloch at Vista Alegre

2016-07-21T12:12:00.003+01:00

The small exhibition space on the first floor of the Vista Alegre Museum, in Ílhavo, dedicated to Serge Bloch’s work, is completely filled with red suitcases. In a exhibition apparatus that is somewhat superlative, as if the frame wanted to compete with the painting itself, we can see the suitcases opened and resting over metallic frames. Under a the strong lighting, the cases – that seem travel luggage – are wainting for someone to reclaim the content composed by book exemplars and original illustrations from the author. On the room walls are works that had a destiny other than book publication: institutional posters and bigger originals of editorial commissions. Guarding the asset there are two totems made with cardboard boxes that almost reach the ceiling. On the boring grey and brown surfaces of the boxes are disjointed figures painted in black. The totems impose a solemn respect to whom enters the space, as if the visitor was to disturb an ongoing conversation between them and the suitcases.

Born in 1956 in the region of Alsace, in France, Sege Bloch had no idea about what to do with his life after graduating from high school. He worked in several jobs that range from civil construction to assembling lines in factories, passing through painting arrows in roads, drilling holes in heavy industry or even emptying buckets of blood in surgery operation rooms. He dedicates himself to illustration after finding out that there is actually a profession called… illustrator! He enrolls at the École Supérieur de des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg and from then on his career progresses when he joins several design studios and newspapers, at the same time he works freelance. Beyond the publications for children his editorial and communication work can be found in newspapers like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, etc.

Among the books present are: La Grande Histoire d’un Petit Trait, definitely autobiographic, with the reference to influences and motivations of the will to produce a trace; Le Collectionneur, a suggestive title for a content that also fetches most of its substance at the author’s life; L’Ennemi, that tells the human drama inside the absurdity of war; Poémes et Chansons de Jacques Prévert and O Tigre na Rua (The Tiger in the Street, edited in portuguese), a good excuse to let a fine indian ink trace get entangled in poetry letters.

The work of Serge Bloch seems to completely usurp the notion of creativity and originality (in the most conventional meaning of the term) leaving nothing for whom might come next. His creative process reduces elaborate notions – read life – to its most elementary forms. It seems that from this author’s drawings one can only build complex things to represent more complex things. With this, this illustrator appeals to our capacity of identifying an idea, a concept or a notion from a minimum of elements. And we figure that he has done it well when we immediately identify in a single twisted trace on the paper any object or scene from the everyday. Well understood, one can maybe say the same about several other authors. Yet, Serge Bloch doesn’t limit himself to a purist attitude and resorts to anything that comes handy (graphically, that is) to urgently spew out the ideas on paper.

In primary school the child that draws wants to evolve towards the more complex forms in order to better represent the real, to better represent the world that surrounds him. Serge Bloch however, doesn’t shy away from freely getting back to primary school to show us what meanwhile has been lost with that ambition.

Exhibition “Serge Bloch” at the Museum of Vista Alegre, following “Ilustrarte 2016”. Integrated event in the Festa da Vista Alegre festivity program. To see until 31 august. Free entrance.
More information HERE
To know more about Serge Bloch: www.sergebloch.net

Note: photos by Rogério Guimarães.

Drawing Outside the Paper: Robin Rhode

2016-04-16T18:43:00.001+01:00

Chalk Bike, 2015. Chalk and steel bicycle. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

The evolution of the graphics technique has ingrained in Man’s cultural condition in such a way that, in time, most of the people acquires the notion that to a drawing is always linked a traditional support such as paper, tissue or even skin – human (tattoo, for example) or from another animal (the medieval parchment and vellum when the paper technology was unknown in the west). Let’s remember still the technical drawing – or the techniques of drawing – used by carpenters or masons when they make marks and lines (primordial elements of drawing) over the stone and the wood to then work upon them. Taking this into account, how odd will be, therefore, to draw outside the paper? Would the act of drawing outside the paper subtract propriety to the concept of drawing? Certainly not. Making marks with a scribbling material it’s the elementary essence of drawing and if not as art, then, at least, as a support to reasoning and creative thought. This generic introduction about the otherness of drawing it’s only to frame the epistemic condition of how many contemporary artists reconstruct drawing outside the paper in an actual way.
Robin Rhode, born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1976, was raised in Johannesburg and graduated from the South Africa School of Film, Television and Dramatic Arts (Johannesburg) in 2000. Although growing up in a post-apartheid era, this artist was more influenced by the new individual expression streams than by the course of effervescent sociopolitical questions. In his work, Robin Rhode encompasses various visual media such as photography, performance, sculpture and drawing to create narratives with more or less socioeconomic critical penchant. His concern seems to be, actually and above all, the narrative of the expression of the individual.
The majority of his works show a gestural sequence – for which, a more advised observer might remember Elliot Erwitt’s “Sequentially Yours” – that implies performance and for which is inherent the component time. Performance cannot exist without the component time and lesser yet without the component space, entering the latter into account through the graphic representations that build the foundations for the sequence. In the two-dimensional images that he creates, the two components – space and time – are collapsed by the observer’s imaginary and refer to the sequence of the gesture even when this sequence is not explicit, but only lets itself be deducted (Chalk Bike, see below). The gesture, in turn, it’s all of those with which the observer can be identified with and that is, somehow, familiar. The hand that activates a chalk disc player (Wheel of Steel) or the fisherman with the fishing rod in hand, fighting a pisciform group of triangles (School of Fish) are images that at first glance reveal themselves as photographic, like if they were fragments of a more completed animation but that, in fact, are settled in a more fundamental form without losing their dynamic condition of latent gestural movement: drawing. In Robin Rhode’s imagery drawing assumes the dimension that it’s proper to it: to transmit an idea, a notion, through a minimum amount of elements that allows the interlocutor to identify the object present in the representation. The observer’s knowledge along with his experience builds up the rest of the narrative according with the instructions given by the artist’s work through the complementary languages (performance, sculpture, etc.) that compose the global work, whether it is to transport to the memory, to transport to a lived experience or to any everyday aspect – although in this case the everyday activity for which it’s referred is used as a bridge to other more transcending meanings such as the logic or mathematical relations (Pascal’s Iron) or the “dance of numbers” in those disciplines (Typing Steps). The work (Bent Mies) is a paradigmatic one when it comes to drawing elements: an individual seems to pull the line that constitutes the chair which design is from Mies Van Der Rohe (double reference to the drawing condition), but instead of the undoing of the chair as happens when a line from a wool sweater is pulled, here the object/chair gets to multiply more and more as the line gets to materialize in a tube (raw material of Mies Van Der Rohe chair) in an absolutely delicious game that questions, ultimately, what might be understood by drawing.
Robin Rhode is, therefore, an expert in the use of the drawing concept in its extra-ordinary form, not holding himself at the street art aesthetics and conventions.

Robin rhode lives and works in Berlin and his work is included in several public collections, including Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Miami Art Museum (Florida), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (France), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) e o Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).

Robi Rhode is represented by Lehmann Maupin and you can see a selection of his works here.

Detail of Chalk Bike, 2015. Chalk and steel bicycle. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

Evidence, 2015. Vinyl, charcoal and barbed wire. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

Light Giver, Light Taker, 2015. Lâmpada preta: poliurethane foam and charcoal; lâmpada branca: poliurethane foam and chalk. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

Karla Ortiz

2016-04-16T17:48:00.000+01:00

Puerto Rican Karla Ortiz is a relevant presence at the third editon of Trojan Horse was a Unicorn (THU) that is taking place from the 15th to the 19th September in Tróia, Portugal. Based in San Francisco, this illustrator has as main activity the work she develops for Marvel Film Studios, where she’s presently collaborating in the production of the movie Dr. Strange.
Aside her main activity and her immersion in the digital artistic world, Karla Ortiz also produces drawings of great beauty in which the medium of choice is graphite and where the surreal and oneiric nature is a dominant. Auroque.zine here shares a time-lapse video showing the production of one of her drawings.

Medieval Scribbles

2016-04-16T16:59:00.001+01:00

Drawing executed to indicate an important part of the text for future reference [Courtesy Dr. Erik Kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden]

Let's consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: you are in a meeting with your group of work on the multinational corporation in which you exert functions. It's been more than a hour and a half that the group is in a discussion about the 'sex of the angels'. You work in front of a computer for eight hours a day and at the present the job you were assigned has some problems that need to be addressed. While the person in charge of directing the meeting doesn’t question the evolution of your job, you make some scribbles on the pages of the dossier that you have before you, lost in your thoughts, far away from that room. The scribbling evolves, some of them having sense, others not, but always within a discrete fashion along with what seems to you as hours and hours of meeting...

Scenario 2: the teacher of the course that you are forced to attend is in a uninterrupted verbiage since the very beginning of the class (three quarters of an hour before...) and it promises to continue for the next hour. The course that you are attending doesn’t have, in fact, any use for the ends that the graduation is proposed to. But it’s part of the curriculum and without the approval at that course you will not get your certificate. How to survive, then, at a time like this? One solution will be scribbling in the advised official book for class orientation (which was, after all, quite expensive) to the taste of thoughts and daydreaming for which the window next to your desk much contributes…

We might think that perhaps these two scenarios (which so many other variations on time and space) are maladies of the modern times. But maybe that’s not true. In fact, some books of the 13th and 14th centuries show us a different reality. Dr. Erik Kwakkel, a medieval books scholar, shows us some of the oldest doodles made on the margins of books pages. However, most of these doodles would have different purposes depending on the person who made them, being able to be distinguished in three kinds. The first kind of doodle, those that can be found in the pages of the beginning or the end of the books, had the purpose of previously try the pen as well as the gesture, in what one might call 'pen trials', with which the writer or the amanuensis would undertake the endeavour of writing the book. As Dr. Kwakkel refers, the scribbles of this nature demonstrates much of the of the scribe's way of being, for he had to adapt the style of the writing (in form and content) according to the monastery where he worked, the region or even the country to where he moves. Nevertheless, the pen trials were invariably done in the standard style of the place or region where scribe's training took place.
The second kind of scribbles is that that served as text markers for the portions of text that the readers considered important for future reference. Although the value of the middle age books would be compared at that time to other luxury items (let’s not forget that we are talking about books whose production is prior to the advent of European letterpress typography) we can find yet a third type of scribbles and drawings that seem to be indicative of one and one thing only: boredom! As it looks, the dullness of reading a philosophy book at school - especially if you are a young student... - is transversal to the course of the centuries and it goes back to the first book editions. When it comes to monotony and boredom nothing is held to sacred or to valuable…
(via Colossal)

Doodle on the lower margin of a manuscript page containing Juvenal's "Satires" [Courtesy Dr. Erik Kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden]

Figures with pointy noses, Library of the University of Leiden, 13th century (MS BPL 6 C) [Courtesy of Dr. Erik kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden]

[Courtesy of Dr. Erik Kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden]

Doodle discovered in a 13th century law manuscript (Amiens BM 347) [Courtesy of Dr. Erik Kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden].

Pen trials by writing short sentences and drawings. These 'pen trials' are from the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 15th century [Courtesy of Dr. Erik Kwakkel and the Library of the University of Leiden]

The Art of Breakfast

2016-04-15T17:22:00.000+01:00

Artist Danny Gregory shows how drawing is a tool of observation and registration of the everyday of the individual. One must merely have present the notion that art comes before food…
For all of those who want to experience drawing and celebrate life:

Patrick Vale: A Step Beyond The Sketchbook

2015-09-01T17:49:00.000+01:00

Time lapse of the work Colossus by artist Patrick Vale. The magnanimity of this work elevates the notion of graphic journal to another dimension. The drawing in question is not a graphic journal page but instead a drawing that leapt from there to a sheet (or better, three sheets) of paper. London based artist, Patrick Vale, draws a magnificent view from of the Manhattan borough from teh Empire State Building. In an interview Vale states that its concern is not to produce a true representation but instead to let the pen decide what is necessary to show. The time lapse videos have gone viral and launched the artist's name.

The Bodies of Justine Albisser aka Sirlonie

2015-08-26T22:46:00.000+01:00

Justine Albisser (aka Sirlonie) show us the purity of the traditional drawing materials (charcoal and graphite), where the final product doesn’t hide the underlying elements (particularly visible in the hands of the models). It’s this dimension that constitutes part of the magic of drawing on paper for it’s inseparable from the artist’s attitude, its error or hesitation when they occur, or inseparable, simply, from the working stages and layers (physical or psychological) laid one upon the other during the process that ranges from the white sheet of paper until the reunion of the final product. The dominant motive of these works it’s the body and the face without being directly related to the portrait, of expressionist character and far from the caricature.
(website: http://sirlonie.tumblr.com/)

The Upsetting Drawings of Sandra Vázquez De La Horra

2015-08-25T23:24:00.000+01:00

A Toda A Prisa / In A Great Hurry, 2009. Graphite on paper, waxed. 35 x 25 cm.

At a first glance, the drawings of Sandra Vázquez De La Horra immediately moves us towards the direction of the fears that we’ve locked up in a box deep in a corner of our mind. They are the fears that we know are there, that we want to forget and even less we want to touch them.
Transposed the barrier/attitude of judgement, we can observe that the work of Sandra Vázquez sits on deep spiritual notions obtained in the continuous path of the search for spiritual knowledge to understand the mundanity of what surrounds us. South America – the artist was born in Chile, in 1967 – is fertile ground in such sources of knowledge: Pomba Gira and the Umbanda in Brasil; the celebration of the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and the adoration of Santa Muerte (Holy Death), to cite only a few examples of deep rooted cults into the popular tradition and which origins are actually placed in the pre-Colombian era. The idea of death it’s recurrent in the work of Sandra De La Horra. But here, by opposition of the notion of end, death is worked (shown) as a constant of life. And to confirm it, there’s the immediate perception that we have of her works when we feel that we’ve just entered a bad dream that we had during the night and that, simultaneously, we cannot escape. We don’t rest indifferent at these drawings that seem drafts made by someone who have been in another place, an almost unreachable place, and that came back to show us how it was.
(via Cargo Collective )
Sandra Vázquez De La Horra is represented by David Nolan Gallery, New York.

O Condenado / The Condemned, 2009. Graphite on paper, waxed, 66,5 x 51 cm.

La Protección Contra El Mal / The Protection Against Evil, 2011. Watercolour and pencil on paper, 77 x 56 cm.

La Compañera / The Companion, 2010. Graphite on paper, waxed, 38,5 x 26 cm.

Oh Sole Mio, 2010. Graphite on paper, waxed.

Santo Prodigio / Holy Prodigy, 2010. Graphite on paper, waxed.

Sleeping With A Clown, 2008. Graphite on paper, waxed. 25 x 17,5 cm.