THE SKETCH OF THE INFEASIBLE
Adriane Hernandez
When the drawing shows so many absences, would it deny the logic of the drawing and of the drawing action? Conducting insignificancies through the potency of a void, with little – or much – noise, it becomes noticeable; challenges the logic of the sketches by creating arrangements of impossible plans, experiences coming as much from the organism as from the geometry, showing this dialect as essential unfinishedness. And if in nature leaves and colors, instead of growing, unfolded themselves as someone unfolding random parts of an origami? Voids inside voids, spaces within spaces, but always nonplaces emerging from the fold. The stripped is conquered in lines, sometimes subtle, sometimes shaky, sometimes steady, sometimes thin, sometimes thick; lines that operate the re-outlining and the spaces. These last ones, as plans, sometimes with color, sometimes without any material, except for the paper itself with its accidents, sometimes light tones and, sometimes, very dark – reaching black in well delimited areas – and sometimes with smudges. Like a sketch of the infeasible, shows all kinds of uncertainties, which is its impossibility. It couldn’t be any different! It’s drawing under construction.
Almost figure
There’s something almost hypnotic in the encounter of different materials. In Guilherme Dable’s drawings, even after the works are considered finished, the materials remain, one by one, more or less recognizable: the white paper, which never disappears completely and whose portions – precisely, blank – are decisive in the construction of the image; the graphite, base of the line, base of the drawing; the acrylic paint; the scented bee wax; the oil stick; the crepe tape, that, even after being removed, leaves harsh trace of its presence. What happens is that these elements, here, live together in a relative harmony, they never annul each other or contradict each other. Although they combine, they don’t actually blend. If there’s tension, it’s not eloquent, thunderous. Above all, what is guessed is the artist’s delight in the continuous experimentation with these materials: and if the graphite, although affirmative, was kept tenuous? And what if the oil was very much diluted, willful? And if the acrylic leaked, spilling above and below the tape that will be removed?
In the drawings, the tension, if there’s any, comes mostly from the combination of the shapes and maybe it’s even more stimulating than the encounter of materials. From above, a geometry advances in yellow, a hard yellow, almost solid, that abruptly, cuts for a stretch in black, which unfolds in two others, each one in a distinct grey. From below, a series of leakages emerges, some in the rhythm of the paint dilution, others severely interrupted. Blank plans, graphite lines, some very light green and a recollection of the yellow complete the composition. There’s also a blue line that accompanies the drawing in one of the vertical extremities, from top to bottom. The compound has nothing of loose, it’s firm, vibrant.
Maybe it would be useful to remember something of the creation process of these works; less for the fetishist flavor that generally accompanies the discourses about art (in an attempt, already known to be failed, to elucidate the mysteries of the invention), but, more, for the desire to try to understand better the reasons for their fascination. In the origin, the observation of the world. Dable keeps his eyes focused on the conformations of the landscape, from the wider one, in which the line of the buildings cut the horizon line, to that most intimate, domestic, that refers, for example, to the way the chair fits to the table. All the edges matter, the surroundings are full of them, one has only to observe, from the room’s window to the departure lounge, at the airport. This extensive and endless repertoire, the artist registers on drawing books, pieces of paper and in his own memory. In the composing moment, it all reappears, but as mere pretext. It’s never about a faithful base to be followed. There isn’t an excessive attachment to the constructive references, they return only as a kind of echo, a vague memory of perception of the world’s things and of possible representative synthesis.
The representation theme, always dear to the History of Art, goes on open. In Dable’s drawings, which in the beginning seem abstract, the issue returns more or less as a ghost. There’s, there, only a remote identity between the plans, the transparencies and the lines that articulate themselves and the world itself, the angles, the straight lines and the edges that the artist saw in the space. These images are made visible, in the drawings, only as suggestions, latencies, almost figures that are insinuated but not completed. In the encounter of materials, in the encounter of different shapes, in what vibrates and hypnotizes the eye, there’s something that celebrates precisely the absence, the incompleteness, the impossibility of separation between figure and background. The memory of something that has already been seen and the promise of something that will never be reached live together at the same time.