A field goes on for a while, then it stops. The plots of land, the walls, the leaves and the hedges – the wallpapers are transformed, one into the other. Along the way there is meadow shrubbery (perhaps it's raining). Nearby, a Mariachi band plays a refrain, sounds which seem to echo on and on. Slips of paper send back their reports, warp around, or peel off from the connection to things: panorama-membranes loosed from the horizon, water lilies which flower in the oval Orangerie. Very much like a kind of preliminary wallpaper – hide and seek – crossfaded repertoires. It's possible that the longing does not wish to touch but remains, relieved.
The exhibition room is replastered: starting with the lower half, stretching from the floor to as high as the arm can reach. It results in a field of damp plaster, a horizon, stretching across the room like the border between two volumes, which for a while, apparently, lay on top of each other, until everything dries. The lower, tangible part of the room configures itself, from the floor level up to its upper edge, as a room for sketching and working – a set of surroundings framed by the rim of a broad frieze.
When one is on stilts, the upper part of the room becomes accessible. As it is uncultivated and empty, this space is reserved just for viewing. Laying in bed, I sometimes look up at the ceiling, into a space above, which is simply there: like the heavens. At times, stains become images, like clouds. Sometimes inaccessibly high spaces appear to be immeasurable and lay, as it were, beyond graspable intention. In addition, the relationship of view room to work room is indebted not only to proportion, but also to differentiation. And exhibiting, perhaps, means to put something else into this clear relationship.
The space, in this special set of circumstances, fitted out with a surrounding layer of blank sheets level with my height, really stands in direct relation to myself. I wallpaper the room, draping it with blank signs and shutters. I chart the space by lining it; empty it by filling. The walls are thus clothed with an internal skin of sheets, loosely affixed, as high as I can reach – up to the edge of the door frame. Sheet is joined to sheet, covering plaster and stains, leaving small gaps between them. The room appears to be newly clothed by this application, which conceals and initializes the wall, yet allows it, here and there, to be seen as through a semi-permeable membrane.
Next I draw with graphite, tapping the wall with rapid, compact strokes. They fall abruptly with short repeated movements onto their target. Streaks and slashes, falling resolutely, with a downwards motion to the level of my step, continuing along the horizontal layout of the sheets in the room. The whole field of vision is covered with marks. These dense, pattering, drizzling, dropping strokes, follow their own measured rhythm more than any sense of optical placement. They are moments of brief contact with a falling hand. With several passes over all the sheets and on all sides, a frieze that lines the room, gradually comes into being. Then however, it dissolves, stroke by stroke, into a streaked patterning, like that of a hide (not against the grain): whirls at the withers.
Attempts to shutter off locations or conditions sometimes end in a line, or drawing, which is like the edge of a hole. Something might stand in the way, which by itself would make it possible to grasp the space between, to mark off – distances. Viewing the pictorial limits between the wall and the eyes is like looking through a camera at a chamber-play: A small theatre – eyes looking beyond the images, which nevertheless reveal something. When I withdraw and see things more abstractly, the markings remain; borderlines which make something wide and vague perceptible. A sheet can be touched at innumerable spots, and damaged as well. The pencil marks certain places, differentiating them, and the rest remains indeterminate. Dibutade drew the silhouette of her lover on the wall, marking the border between the shadow-figure and bright background. I think that a drawing therefore exists by means of and within its borders, but that is not what drawing is. I hook myself in, traverse a surface, a continuum, again and again. My drawing pricks into a broad field and orients itself, sporadically.
The sheets are taken down, and the strokes, which are now speckling the sheets by the thousands, are carefully, one by one, cut along the margin, punched out. I hem them along a cutting-line and separate them from the paper ground. They become holes, eyelids, blank signs, small interstices – stanciae. Figure is split from ground: di-segno. The sheets become transparent and develop interior borders, which then, like the edges of the sheet, are both cut edge and image border. Now the relationship between the front and back sides of the sheet is equalized.
I turn the sheets over and finally hang them, one by one, behind glass, with their original front side facing the wall. By turning over the sheets, even the last traces of the drawing process disappear in the scant space between the sheet and the wall. The worked sheets turn into a work in the space: exhibiting them would be like turning up the wallpaper. And as I turn and shift them, their disunity is a component of the space and is also reflected in the state of my images.
A borderline circumscribes and thereupon separates what is part of the image and what is a part of the surroundings. With cutting, drawing comes into being as edge, appearance, a hinge between sheet and wall; each one is both ground and bearer of the image. But now one borders the other: sheet and wall and wall and sheet. Is the drawing; is drawing, neutralised? It presents, in these places, a white wall, diaspern, the same color, shot through with both ground and pattern. Something becomes visible in its disappearance, and something appears which one has not seen: unforseen after-images.
The glass reflects you, the space and the work itself; the window, the park and beyond, the tracks and Robert Arber's house.
In the end I removed all the sheets and the pieces of glasses. I laid the pieces of glass side by side on the floor to reflect the space and the light.
Translation by Michael Pisaro
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