HORIZONTAL DRAWING: 2012

Joachim Koester, My frontier is an endless wall of points (after the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux),

Joachim Koester (°1962, Denmark) shows a mass of turbulent moving lines in his 'psychedelic documentary' about the drawings from Henri Michaux. Koester is attracted by the human body and its 'terra incognita', its subconscious. The Belgian artist Michaux (°1899 - 1984) tried to write in a pure visual way without the use of written language or meaning, influenced by mescaline and other mind-expanding substances. He wanted to explore a world that may not be possible to capture in words.

Joachim Koester, My frontier is an endless wall of points (after the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux),

Joachim Koester, Maybe One Must Begin with Some Particular Places,

Smak, Gent, till 2013, March 10

Steven Baelen doesn't speak about his drawings as sketches, but calls them notes. They are no study's, neither finished, but appear as autonomous work. He notes the environment, especially his studio. It is filled with a lot of stuff. Life continues and apparently nothing changes.

© Steven Baelen,Watou,charcoal on wall, 2009

Baelen tries to catch moments in time. He obliges himself to build empty spaces in order to counteract the fullness of his surroundings. The white space functions as a punctuation mark and helps the viewer to enter the space.

Book launch, artist book "Der Raum im Verzug", made in collaboration w/ Akademie der Künste, with a text by Hubertus von Amelunxen, Elaine Lévy Project, Brussels

2012, December 20 - 22

Tinus Vermeersch creates a universe with laws and proportions different from the world we know. Sometimes the drawings seem to refer to a lost civilization from the past. Archeology and original cultures inspire Vermeersch. He uses several archetypes.

The characters are often performing an unclear act. An absurd and surrealistic layer shines through the image.

Colourful objects float in front of a grey space. They remain of hair covering dark empty spaces. The microscopic small details don't enlarge the meaning of the forms; they are undefinable.
The drawing represents a process. The sidebar is filled with some pencil lines. The viewer has an analytical insight in the colours used for the collection. The forms seem to belong to a bigger unit. It looks like one part is missing.

© Tinus Vermeersch, Tegumen XIII, 2011, tempera on paper, 60 x 80 cm

Land-schapes in Gallery Hopstreet, Brussels
November 10 - December 22, th - sa, 2 - 6 pm

Roni Horn, Such 3, 2012, pigment and varnish on paper, 170.2 x 168.9 cm © Xavier Hufkens Gallery

'If you were to ask me what I do, I would say I draw – this is the primary activity – and that all my work has this in common regardless of idiom or material.’

(Roni Horn in a letter to Paulo Herkenhoff, 2003)

Roni Horn, Must 49, 1985, pigment and varnish on paper, 22.9 x 36.8 cm © Xavier Hufkens Gallery

'These works move beyond the limitations of their medium and instead explore the materiality of colour and the sculptural potential of drawing.' (1)

(1) Selected Drawings 1984 - 2012, Press, Xavier Hufkens Gallery

2012, October 25 - November 24

© Marc Nagtzaam, A Small Set of Examples, 98,3 x 67,7 cm (2012)

Nagtzaam makes drawings. Using graphite and the occasional colored pencil, he works primarily in black and white and in varying formats of paper, from small to middling, which are never smaller than a magazine page and rarely, if ever exceed the format of the human body (except for in the rare cases of wall drawings). The visual repertoire of the drawings ranges from a kind of hard-edge all-over abstraction to the reproduction of the written word. Seemingly idiosyncratic grids of differing modes and sizes abound, while exploded lattices of linear markings stream across surfaces of paper with an apparent randomness, and circular, all-over doodles are apotheosized into meticulous labors of graphic splendor. The language pieces generally consist of two types: one of which features the title of the work or a group of potential titles collaged together at random and drawn out on paper, and the other which features language culled from art magazines, copied and written on the paper in seemingly coherent columns. The art magazine language drawings are marked with all the imperfect and uneven personality of gesture which one normally expects from pencil on paper, and which is almost entirely absent from the much more controlled geometric drawings that comprised the rest of the artist's practice. This makes for a paradox, and consequently, the kind of tension that essentially animates Nagtzaam's output. Proceeding as such, he manages to render the highly impersonal language of art journalism manifestly personal-- a language moreover that could hardly be more codified; as codified, in fact, and therefore as ineluctably borrowed as abstraction-- while he to all intents and purposes, submits a rather personal process of abstraction to the alienating anonymity of the grid.(1)

Lecture, Campus Congres, Kerkstraat 45, Antwerp

2012, November 14, 6 pm
Free entrance

(1) Chris Sharp, Paris 2010

'The motor behind Ante Timmermans' artistic production is the routines imposed by society. In his work we can discover a microscopic analysis of human activities as much as an all- encompassing universal synthesis of philosophical thoughts. In the large drawings it looks like a complex chaos dominates. However on closer observation, as in an ants nest, we can recognise repeating structures and patterns. Ante maps the everyday rut that the French call 'metro-boulot-dodo' in a seemingly scientific way. Even his own uncontrolled pencil-marks can be seen as an affirmation or disavowal of his own routine actions, as a release mechanism or programmed compulsiveness. In other drawings the city or some aspects of the city are more explicitly presented as symbols of our habit-controlled behaviour. The skyline of a big city becomes a shaky tower of Babel, does it persist through its own absurdity or through its manipulative capacities?' (1)

Lecture, Campus Congres, Kerkstraat 45, Antwerp
2012, December 5, 6 pm
Free entrance

(1) Text (fragment): Tanguy Eeckhout Translation (Dutch-English): Literal 2006

notes from the lecture

A remarkable question from one of the students for Ante: 'Do you believe in reincarnation?' Ante was 1 second silent, surprised, but answered short and clear 'no'.

"A sketchbook is a collection of ideas. Intimate snap shots. You can begin again and begin again and begin again. You can turn the pages and close the book." These words are from artist and writer Felicity Allen. She made a book to help you to start a sketchbook, illustrated by historic and contemporary artists.

The art practice of Dirk Zoete (1969°, BE) is mainly drawing. The artist talks about his sculptures and installations as a way of drawing. He constructs an utopian architecture, independent of reality, but with a logical and practical base. Sometimes the character of his work is childish, or even naive. Zoete tries to focus on what he calls survival architecture.

Lecture (in Dutch) on September, 27, 8 pm, library Aalst.

www.dirkzoete.be

Jockum Nordström in Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp

until October 6

'The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.' William Kentridge (1)

(1) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge. Phaidon Press, 1999, p 8.