Fits of Drawing -

Diogo Pimentão (born Lisbon 1973, based in London) brings a new dimension to the art of drawing through his choice of materials and processes. Bent and twisted, his works which bear the mark of the body become full-scale pieces of sculpture, with their own music and choreography. Here we have a veritable exhibition on paper especially created for L'Ofciel Art in which he rethinks the format of the drawing and its presentation. Julie Pellegrin, director of La Ferme du Buisson will be our guide for this exhibition. “For Diogo Pimentão, the drawing is everything, whether it be given shape, movement or sound. While his practice ranges further afeld, drawing constitutes a veritable paradigm. To draw is to work without preconceptions or prototypes, "to proceed without protection." The works’ fragile, transitory nature and the use of rudimentary techniques go hand in hand with a fundamentally inquisitive, experimental relationship to the world, a distant echo of childhood activities, a contest between improvisation and precision. The artist endeavors to expand the horizons of drawing and its conventions to other dimensions, processes and tools. For him, the act of drawing involves a nearchoreographic approach to the body that determines the scale of the piece—from paper folded by unthinking hands to big black monochromes tracing the lines of a body in action. The page appears no longer to be a fat surface but a supple, pliable, stretchable and practicable plane.

The drawing becomes an instrument in its own right: it aims to appropriate a space— the page, exhibition or flm—with the pencil’s journey revealing its span, texture and resilience, in the same way that the action or motion of the body—drawings in space— permit the exploration of a given frame.

In their repetitiveness, Pimentão’s movements express a sort of refex, rigorous but devoid of intent: trace, cut, roll, scatter. The drawing is not the outcome of a decision; it is literal demonstration of a process. It cohabits not only with the tools used in its realization but also with the vestiges of its production (graphite chunks or residue, tape scored with colored lines, ghosts of cut-out paper). In the videos, as elsewhere, the result is exhibited at the same time as the experience of its creation: the work incorporates its making-of; form is constantly made and unmade; the body leaves its mark; the drawing becomes action, language, music.

Experimentation, practice and intuitive knowledge inform each other to confront alienated refexes with possibilities of emancipation.

Fundamental indeterminacy between fguration and abstraction, intention and improvisation, sound and vision, and—within vision itself—mobility and visibility, oscillating from attempted representation to revelation of an entropic process where shapelessness predominates, where disappearance succeeds appearance. “The image is made” if, like Samuel Beckett, one considers that making the image means organizing a depiction then making it disappear since the stage remains empty.”