Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present "NSEW drawing on paper", a group exhibition of works by artists from around the world dedicated to drawing. Beyond the space constraints of the sheet of paper and the simplicity of the material that drawing implies, this exhibition bears witness to the diversity, complexity and freedom offered by this medium. Bringing together artists of different generations, origins and artistic practices, a common desire binds them: to transcribe on paper their keen observation of the world while giving life to their ideas, emotions, and convictions. This journey into their singular universe and imagination engages the viewer in an inner reflection.
Some consider that drawing is to images what writing is to words. Thomas Broomé shakes up this assumption, building interior spaces and objects with words with a perfect mastery of perspective. Combining the signifier and the signified, the repetition of these words is used to designate and delimit, composing the backgrounds and forms that create the image. The naming of each element and detail gives them equal importance, immersing the viewer in a true reading of his work. Convinced that the rooms in which we live are our self-portraits, or those to which we aspire, Broomé invites us to contemplate the portrait of these places, to read their biography and to understand the world around us.
At the center of her artistic practice and the basis of all her new projects, İnci Eviner looks at the world through drawing. Images flood our existence through the media, holding the power of representation. Eviner attempts to question them, to create new spaces of expression, taking a stand as an artist and citizen on subjects that are relevant to contemporary society: the status of women, the figure of the refugee, the formation of subjectivities... This series finds its references both in the history of classical art and in the artist's own photographic projects and installations. Eviner explores the question of the portrait as a means of expression or sublimation of our identities. “To watch” or “to demonstrarte”, the relationship between the artist, the subject and the viewer are intertwined, hidden behind masks that carry different identities.
Starting from explorations on the formal, historical, and cultural characteristics of everyday objects and images, focusing on their materiality to transform it, Mauro Giaconi redraws, superimposes, modifies these supports. Exploring the idea of an enlarged drawing that leaves its traditional format giving it a sculptural dimension, he constitutes new images that embody and echo the primary subject of these objects. Thus, the thirty-four pages of Ernan de Sandozequi's book are stripped and covered with an image whose repeated motif embodies its political content. While raising issues of censorship and freedom of expression, Giaconi's work visually gives meaning to the content of this object transposed to the status of an artwork, to propose reflections on our social, cultural, and political environments.
The creative universe of Florencia Rodríguez Giles is impregnated with the customs of our societies, dreams, emotions, and other fruits of the unconscious, to which she gives life in new fictional narratives or alternative worlds. In the series SONÁMBULA, the artist draws in black and white the portrait of characters or situations, merging realistic details and fantastic representations from the universe of bestiaries. Thus, it is with the precision of a sleepwalker who walks through his house in the dark, that tongues, paws, snouts, combine movements and tactile explorations, creating new encounters in futuristic and symbiotic scenes. Like a reverie that becomes reality, senseless and non-rational, the spectator is plunged into a universe between wakefulness and sleep.
It is through a ritualized creative process that Fabrice Souvereyns deploys infinite variations of his work that are the fruit of observation, imagination, and his creativity. He spontaneously explores his paper and fills every millimeter of his drawing in a frenetic way, with patterns and abstract lines, deep cuts creating reliefs, to sometimes erase all or part of it. Inspired by nature, photography and the artist's own memories, his dense compositions are made up of details, patterns and macro-elements that together form organic movements that lead the viewer into a larger vegetal world or cosmic landscape. Thus, his drawings offer different levels of reading mixing abstraction and figuration, also engraving the traces of what has never existed elsewhere than in our imagination.
