PAPERWEIGHT

A small, fine exhibit at AnySpace, Drawings’ Conclusions, showcases architectural drawings from the 1990′s and 2000′s, when production was migrating, uneasily, from the drafting board to the computer screen. It was a tumultuous time. As an architecture graduate just entering the profession, I witnessed the drama firsthand. Seasoned architects set down their pencils and handed production responsibilities to computer-literate novices. Young architects who had mastered drafting software, and not much else, began taking the lead in office work. Architecture became further detached from any deep understanding of construction, and design became a game played on computers, an image-making unmoored from physical realities. We see the results of this shift in our cities now, where major new civic and commercial buildings have the hollow aspect of projections.

The drawings on display in the show are skillful and touching. Skillful technically, in their angelic pencil and ink linework, and also intellectually, in their clear expression of architectural ideas. There are no fantasies here. However surprising any drawing’s forms and geometries, it offers strong propositions about a building. Best of show goes to to Greg Lynn‘s computer-drafted line diagrams for the Slavin House. This small structure was conceived around a coiled frame that resembles a knit strand of yarn come undone. It’s drawings call out radii and lengths systematically, rationally, conventionally, exactly as required for fabrication.

The distended coil is just the kind of form can be generated easily, randomly, scalelessly, in seconds, in a drafting program like AutoCAD. But Lynn’s drawings remain stubbornly orthogonal. They were imagined in section and elevation, on the page, with pragmatic spatial thinking. They aren’t about the image of the building but about its geometries and profiles. Though these drawings generated by a computer, they have a stodgy solidity, a physical logic. It’s a logic that would disappear soon enough, as new architects began designing with no memory of pencil or paper, of steel frames, and of the cartesian grid.

February 03, 2018 by Nalina Moses

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.” It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design. Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography.

Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman. His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge. Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it. Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings.

Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully. Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth. In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility. The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf. All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story. If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed.

January 07, 2016 by Nalina Moses