People Who Draw
Christine Cavallomagno
Since MoMA’s 2003 landmark exhibition "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions" officially outed the return of drawing, the medium has been liberated from former taboos and has been allowed to flourish as art in and of itself, as both a means and an end to the creative process. This renewed focus on drawing has encouraged several drawing-centered exhibitions, most recent among them, "Fine Line," an exhibition at Adam Baumgold Gallery on East 79th Street. The show brings together over 40 artists ranging in scope from George Grosz’s 1925 work Amo Marseilles, an ambling sketch of 1920s French men and women, to Martin Wilner’s Making History: December 2005, a politically satirical aerial map drawing which shows Iraq as sharing borders with Florida and Connecticut.
The show highlights recent work of many new artists and includes a number of works by book illustrator Renee French. French, whose work has been described as "making cute things uncomfortable," depicts captivating and twisted fairy tales. There are drawings of bunny rabbits wearing strange apparatuses that fall somewhere between neck braces and collars, such as in Untitled (Bunny), making the bunny look like a petite furry Karl Lagerfeld. Her pencil illustrations are intriguing in that they suggest some unholy marriage between Watership Down and Robert Mapplethorpe, with something unsettling lurking behind the very innocent style. Similarly bizarre, Alexander Gorlizki, in his works Untitled (Jackalope) and Red Camel, focuses on a naturalistic depiction of animals and renders strange creatures such as the rarefied jackalope and a spotted magenta and lavender camel in a classical style similar to Durer. Outsider artist James Castle’s Untitled (Interior) was created using saliva and soot on an old piece of cardboard when Castle, born deaf, was denied access to art materials by his parents for a period of time. The drawing shows a room interior faithfully rendered, although its slightly wide-angle perspective makes it look as if it were being viewed through a camera obscura. The tiny image is striking and especially intriguing, considering the elaborate method used to produce it. This kind of intricacy and attention to detail floods the exhibition, from the tiny sparse lines that make up Saul Steinberg’s beautiful and desolate Night Highway and Gas Station to the labyrinthine precision of Jacob El Hanini’s patterned Teomim (1981) drawings, which are texturally dense and cryptic patterns.
Another artist, Alejandro Cardenas, (whose recent work shown at ArtBasel Miami this year has put him on the radar for his intriguing and elegant ink on paper drawings) portrays a similarly intricate work. His drawings, entitled Lisette’s Burden of Responsibility, (2006) and Mountain Maintenance, (2006), reflect influences ranging from Aubrey Beardsley to Edward Gorey. He constructs his own language of mythology, giving his works relevance and accessibility to the viewer, while remaining intriguingly beautiful and intricate. Ernesto Caivano, Cardenas’ peer from Cooper Union, appropriates the visual language of drafting and technical drawing to create extraordinarily intricate, delicate line drawings simultaneously alluding to nature and the metaphysical. Also a mixed-media artist, his work takes on a three-dimensional quality. His rendering of a peacock-type bird on a block of wood surrounded by atomic particles conveys an image of nature on both a macro and micro level.
If Caivano’s work intimates an extreme close-up on reality, Dan Zeller’s ink and graphite work, Embedded Profile, offers a bird’s eye view. Upon first glance the image is a topographical map of some sort. Look closer and one sees an abstracted view of a sleeping city, as if through an airplane window. The landforms surrounding the urban sprawl seem positively organic and manage to take on an anthropomorphic fleshiness.
A last highlight of the show is Rebecca Bird’s Escher-like renderings, a narrative of man against nature. In Easter Special 1-4, the drawings follow a life-cycle of a bird from egg to adult. The story is told in frames as an illustrated text without words. Her final prognosis seems positive, i.e., that nature will be redeemed, despite the destruction wrought by human hands.
In "Fine Line" there is a play on words describing both the precise and finite mark making evident in the work as well as the fact that there is a fine line between that which can be seen and those infinitesimally small components that make up human life. At first glance "Fine Line" offers a concise survey of contemporary drawing. But on a second look, the drawings themselves provide a microcosm of contemporary art, allowing a more careful examination of the first form of art that, by its comprehension, enriches all other art forms.
