Comentario: drawing artists
Vitamin D gives a sense of the vitality and energy of contemporary drawing today. The accomplishment, dedication, fascination, inventiveness and sheer pleasure taken in mark-making and image-making demonstrated in the featured works suggest that drawing is as dynamic a medium as ever, and that artists continue to consider drawing an essential vehicle for addressing and interacting with the world today.
It used to be commonplace to consider drawing as a daily practice. In everyday life we afford drawing a place in the continuum of activities that go almost unnoticed, from telephone scribbles (for a certain generation, perhaps, when landlines prevailed) to the ubiquitous children’s drawings so often brought up as the paradigm of accidental meaning, from laundry lists to mapped directions. In her introductory essay to the previous edition of this overview of current drawing practice, published in 2005, xter insisted on exactly this ubiquity: she defined drawing’s nature as a universal human endeavour, a shared visual language of expression. We use drawing, Dexter writes, "pragmatically to sketch our own maps and plans, but we also use it to dream—in doodles and scribbles. We use drawing to denote ourselves, our existence within a scene: in the urban context, for example, graffiti acts as a form of drawing within an expanded field." The continuity between ourselves and the larger world is expressed through drawing, through marking it, inscribing ourselves into it, through tracing it and making a record and index of some of the elements that surround us; drawing is part of life and life is an occasion to draw.
Joao Ferreira Esad Matosinhos (2023-08-10)