With its Insight and Process sectors dedicated to emerging artists, new experiences, and hybridizations (video, performatives, etc.), Drawing Now Art Fair, the small fair that has become the unmissable event of contemporary drawing, once again testified, at its 16th edition in March,1 the vitality of a medium that seems to be increasingly pushing its limits and abolishing the boundaries between genres. Vitality of a medium often reduced to its “technicality” or its matter when it can be only a line or a spot, a design, an idea, even a gesture, a struggle, or a dance…
© Schönfeld Gallery
It is thus under duress, imprisoned in a glass cage that the Bulgarian artist Boryana Petkova (resident in Poush, already invited last year) has strenuously drawn on the rails of the Gallery S… Among other performative practices of drawing, let us mention that of Stéphanie Mansy (resident at Casa Velasquez in Madrid), deploying her gesture in landscapes bursting in perpetual metamorphosis.
D’après des pastels et crayons de couleurs, oeuvres spoliées ; 66 x 50 cm
Infinite also, the virtuoso drawing of Clément Fourment (born in 1992), whose every image, generated by the previous one, meticulously creates the elements of a phantasmagoric world, bordering on reality and fiction, composing an open book (in several folds) Like an endless BD…
@ Galerie Maia Muller
Erasing
© Archiraar / S. De Schrijver
It is also by erasure that Jonathan Rosić proceeds (born in 1979), but still more radically: reproducing in Chinese ink dilutions of old promotional photographs of invention whose objects he eclipses the represented, he creates an anomaly in the image that disturbs our perception of reality. Here we are unarmed in the face of these elliptical drawings referring to our own potential disappearance.
Disappearance and erasure are also mentioned in Edi Dubien’s Deliquescents. From oscillations to pours, the line in these portraits and self-portraits mixed with animal figures seems to flow like tears. Hesitant and fluid, it passes through fragile bodies, drifting, almost inconsistent, where pain outcrops. These fragmented and hybrid bodies are filled with soft colors and faded floating on the surface of their skin.
© Alain Gutharc
The deconstructed “liquid world” and the attempt to be reborn echo the decontextualized portraits of German artist Tina Berning. Drawn in watercolor, and reduced to their simplest expression to show the essential, to extract “the inner flame,” they also speak of the expressive power of emptiness and the infinite delicacy of a medium allowing us to “see things as an apparition.”3
1. From 23 to 26 March 2023 at the Carreau du Temple in the Marais in Paris
2. Quotes from a February 21, 2022 interview with Annabelle Gugnon
3. Quote by Edi Dubien from Atelier A / Edi Dubien of 16-I-2019 broadcast on www.arte.tv
> Stéphanie Mansy and Nicolas Fourment
Gallery F
27 rue Saint-Pierre, 60300 Senlis
> Mathieu Dufois
Gallery C
6, rue Chapon, Paris III
> Jonathan Rosić
Archiraar Gallery
Rue de la Tulipe 31 A, 1050 Brussels
> Célia Muller
Galerie Maïa Muller
19, rue Chapon, Paris III
> Tina Berning
Schönfeld Gallery
Chaussée de Waterloo 690, 1180 Bruxelles
> Edi Dubien
Alain Gutharc
7, rue Saint-Claude, Paris III
Stéphanie Dulout