The Madness of Seeing

Drawing anticipates what the other techniques discover bravely. Starting with the methods of drawing from the history of arts and going up to the absent and free drawing from nowadays, the confrontation appears in content and in positioning. Drawing is privileged. Drawing can function with the elements thought and determined before, depending on the effect they really create. But in the same time, drawing can deliver immaterial feeling, ambiguous volume.

There is a certain aggressiveness in the subversion of the drawing, but in the same time, there is protest and explanation.

Drawing has the privilege of the model conceived as a game. From the projects of modernity so dear to the 18th century, drawing provokes philosophical discussions in fascinating gardens, while sitting on tables covered with white damask and silver glasses. There is a severe tranquility and a madness of seeing that surrounds drawing. Drawing is always freely associated with analysis, with accuracy, with solitude. Disposing of an enormous time reserve, drawing can create almost trenchant tensions. Each detail includes a deal of complete power.

In the today confused world, drawing can make use of a risky visual vocabulary. A visual irrationality, that changes intuition and delivers melancholy. But in the frames of our own rationality, drawing must be perceived not like a putting up-to-date, but like a re-thinking.

Liviana Dan


The Mechanism of New Art

Drawing has always produced inflating surfaces in arts, because drawing is about vision and visuality, about pleasure, definition and out-of-space structures. Interpreting a drawing is like interpreting a dream – creating confusion, allowing mistakes, fragmentizing and displacing – though, always remaining positive and hiding the boring immediate reality. A drawing is never sheer drawing, a drawing is the after-math of a definite life-style. One can contemplate, destroy, interpret or pre-construct drawings, but can never posses them.

We hide wishes and discontents in drawings, for we are afraid of darkness and sometimes, just of waking up. We enjoy feeling incomplete and out of order as much as we enjoy creating fine and tactile constructions.

Each artist bears the responsibility of discovering strategies of seeing and of feeling, but it would be so sad to try to re-make the history of arts. Art manifestos are back in fashion, artists exchange rock star-behaviours, Roswell-type of happenings occur every day and the quest for land is stronger than ever.

The new wave of drawing re-establishes methods used in psycho-analysis, fashion-design, exploration, landscape theory and computer imagery. The new drawing generates satisfaction and compulsory peripheral reactions – tenderness, aggressiveness, trust, humour, obsessions, love, purity. Due to this, we’ve discovered different channels of feeling and of possessing what we see and what we refuse to see.

Anca Mihulet