study for objects that do not exist (teorema 10)

2010
graphite on paper
42 x 106 inches/ 107 x 269 cm

artists collection

Imagine drawing a teorema. A provisional observation.  A teorema, or theorem, is simply a probable truth statement, based on an observation.

After ten years of keeping drawings as a private practice,  in early 2010 I began to make large scale abstract drawings in ink/graphite on paper,  called Teoremas. These are large enough to challenge the physical space of the viewer’s, audience’s, body or bodies and attention.  They tend to employ an abstract visual language of markings of which the lineage extends back to the Paleolithic (marks on a wall); but at the same time, reaches through the contemplative literati ink paintings of Northern and Southern Sung periods in China, and into obvious transliterations of late modernism in the work of Krasner, de Feo  Guston, Steir  and Cecily Brown.  The principle of the teorema, or theorem, is simply, that the drawing itself sets up a becoming-state which by virtue of its scale and linear economies, becomes a kind of double-consicousness,  a projecting series of spaces spilling out, in a cascade.  Every mark is a provisional landing, or grounding vector, touching something, as if the paper is skin but also volume moving out into the air you breathe, sharing your breath.  In Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968),  theorem takes form as a visitation--apparently, an angel, who arrives to confront each character in a small, traumatized family.  The confrontation is non-violent but gives birth to something new.  The birth of a violent poem....  In these Teorema drawings, I am exploiting the dispassionate graphic character of line and paper (not the ‘hot’ mass of painting);  as it were, the drawing simply arrives, without speech, without elaboration, without preface.  The drawing will permit us to deliberate on spatial elisions in which there are potential elements of content not-yet-conscious.  Things we cannot see, or, things which are just coming into being, but are not yet born.  In this way a theorem is a drawing of elements of worlds to come.  Prospective rather than retrospective--.playing out iterations that keep moving forward through recursive propellent moves, like a fugue.  The formal strategy is really just a way of implicating a future which is just almost visible but not yet, not quite.  The teorema generates a scoring, or calligraphic series of moves through a series of flows along the via negativa, the negative (empty) path, the wilderness.  The teorema stands forth as a kind of wit(h)ness to an awakening, possibly from the 'sleep' of habitual thinking, or of expectation.