| The art of drawing, often understated in the public perception, comes to the fore in the group exhibition “Drawing on the Wrong Side of the Brain,” curated by the art critic and writer Lyle Rexer. Indeed, the manual dexterity of the hand to perform certain subtle movements, like hand-writing, sewing and knitting have nearly lost their previous currency. The fact that people often experience difficulty in reading their own handwriting only confirms that acts of drawing could appear extinguished and redundant. |  |
Drawing on the Wrong Side of the Brain – Yulia Tikhonova
The art of drawing, often understated in the public perception, comes to the fore in the group exhibition “Drawing on the Wrong Side of the Brain,” curated by the art critic and writer Lyle Rexer.
Indeed, the manual dexterity of the hand to perform certain subtle movements, like hand-writing, sewing and knitting have nearly lost their previous currency. The fact that people often experience difficulty in reading their own handwriting only confirms that acts of drawing could appear extinguished and redundant.
Moreover, this show presents the process of drawing as an art of gestural expression, which is being mediated by the dynamics of the human psyche. The powerful forces of consciousness and unconsciousness are reflected in the works on paper, collages, artist books and photographs presented in the show. These illustrate many of the tensions—that are of a daily nature—that lie between intellect and instinct, knowledge and intuition, spontaneity and calculation, explicitly and implicitly. The show brings the audience back to the fine act of seeing, literally, through the artist’s hands. Where, with one bodily action, is externalized and transformed through human conciseness into physical movements that emphasize gesture, which is a prime constituent of drawing.
However, not only logic and intellect guides the human hand, the unconscious and chance have a role to play that can negate rational thought and set a straight line into the abyss.
What Derrida has aptly described as “the play of chance…forever young, forever new,” is what places the drawing as an output of the right side function of the brain. As is widely known, it is mostly this side that is responsible for the creative and visual character of human activity. However, by its physical nature drawing has to comply with the rules of perception which could be claimed to originate on the left side of the brain. The title of the show is a pun, which highlights the common myth of the “right”as being good, and “left” as being bad.
Conversely, the show also confirms that the very process of drawing, in fact, could be construed as bridging these defined areas. Elusive and suggestive, as it often is, drawing combines logic, precision and patterning with spontaneity, fantasy and emotion. It offers a glimpse into the depths of the human psyche, while unraveling a line, like Ariadne’s thread into the explorations of light and dark.
The inexplicable character of drawing is of prime interest to Lyle Rexer who is a learned scholar of the art of the outsider or the marginalized in society. The drawing of such individuals is utilized as a major form of expression and expanded formally to its outer limits by reference to the often institutionalized untrained, insane and prisoner art practitioners. With many of these, their inflamed imagination oscillates between spontaneity and control, where expression is made through the gesture of a hand, equipped with a pen, the only tool.
However, insistency and repetition reaches far beyond the logical limits in outsider art and it is this aspect that also characterizes the work of the German artist in the show Harald Staffers. One of Staffers works, Letter 17, presents an example of the numerous letters he obsessively writes to his mother every day. The words “Liebe Mutti. Ich werde… “ which he repeats over and over again, is somewhat like a chant. The text transcends linguistic meaning and becomes an endless loop of pattern. For Staffers the process of drawing is an escape from the mental torture of his illness. While losing its original intention, the letter became a system of communication with himself and the key to his personal psyche.
New York-based artist Harvey Tulcensky’s Notebook IX is a small notebook that unfolds to a 108-inch long scroll of paper. At first glance it is covered in an all-over patterned motif, densely comprised of hundreds of ink marks. Along the scroll, these marks form blotches of swollen “materia,” which then dissolve into a surface of regularized rows. The indiscernible concentration of the marks suggests a prolonged somatic gesture, which being obsessively repeated, alludes to the secret meaning of its scripts.
This rather controlled rendering of the surface is echoed by the work of Catalonian artist, Joaquim Chancho. Titled Paper, the work presents arrangements of gouache brush marks in vertical rows. Here, the differentiation of brush impression, applied to rice paper creates visual effects of volume.
In contrast to the graphic formalism of Chancho, the colorful collage of work on paper, Pile by Joanne Greenbaum, is an exciting highlight of the show. In fact, this work reveals a prospect of the artist’s creativity, and potential for the future. To make up this assemblage, several works are executed with either crayon, gouache, pen or pencil, presenting images of fragments of architecture, patterns, surfaces and blotches of color, all contributing to a loose colorful and thematic ensemble. Each work can stand on its own, however; when combined with many others, they surrender a certain independence to the overall polyphony of color and shape. Here the artist’s creative gesture, often restrained to the small format of individual work, involves a certain momentum when she hangs the overall large assemblage on the gallery wall. Effectively, Greenbaum uses these works in the manner of an ever-expanding visual diary that also includes samples of her potential works.
As something of a diversion from the attention-seeking imagery of Greenbaum, several small sepia ink drawings by Gerry Snyder, a participant of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, present landscape vistas which are exquisitely rendered in an almost Flemish-school manner. These vistas Snyder populates with animated human-like characterizations, which resemble characters from TV, such as The Simpsons, The protagonists in Snyder’s works are playful and provocative yet appear slightly odd with their obvious origins in pop-culture, when juxtaposed with the many layers of refined landscape.
Snyder’s portrait of Robert Storr, which is a drawing on a photograph, presents the renowned scholar as a clown. With all the warmth of irony and great respect, Snyder demystifies the intellectual aspects of Storr’s character, portraying him as the subject of multifarious roles, which one has to play in society.
This show presents a variety of drawing mediums that are subjected to a collision of logic and intuition, rationalization and spontaneity, and the forceful energy of these differences combined. If drawing is a somatic act, the contact between a human hand and a sheet of paper is symbolic. It is where the sensorial touch becomes translated into visual form through the agencies of perception, by sentient artistic tools.
In this context, Derrida has defined the “blind” nature of drawing as being rooted in mediated experience of memory, anticipation and contingency. The drawing is never just pure representation, but it is rather the product of a kind of conscious perceptional soupçon and interaction with objects. Thus, drawing originates in the unchartered territory between the right and left side of intellect that is articulated visually through the fleeting mean of a line.¬¬¬¬
