THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING

Works on paper mostly based on films, photos, exhibitions, travels.

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A view of John Russell Pope’s Garden Court at the Frick Collection in New York. 

(October 2016)

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A detail from Kitagawa Utamaro’s Abalones Fisherwomen (1797-1798) seen at Musée Guimet, in the exhibition “Miroir du désir - Images de femmes dans l'estampe japonaise.”

(September 2016)

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A portrait of Robert Beavers, introducing the restored Österreichisches Filmmuseum 35mm print of his From the Notebook of... (1971-1998) at Projections (New York Film Festival). 

For the record, during those days, Manohla Dargis published in the New York Times an article whose title praises directly this incredibly stimulating work: “One of the New York Film Festival’s Best Movies Isn’t at the Main Event.”

(October 2016)

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I went to hear Gerard Malanga reading some of his work - and commenting some of his photographs - at Centre Pompidou on April 1st, 2016. 

Both the poetry and the pictures had a certain tenderness and a form of unpretentiousness that struck me. The myth that accompanies the man seem to have left place to a form of quiet melancholy, that becomes pretty charming in his latest poems: 

(...) Will she what’s-her-name be waiting

or will she be the one and only morning fade-out

with all its ailing unpredictabilities?

He name is slowly fading, fading... No! No!

Is that the way the dream’s telling me to go?

Hug me close, will ya?

Whisper those sweet nothings for nothing’s sake

just one last time before I wake. 

(from: Whisper Sweet Nothings & Other Poems, Bottle of Smoke Press, 2016)

(April 2016)

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A view of the Agnes Martin retrospective, at the Guggenheim in New York: the rigorous grid-based abstraction encounters the zoological nautilus shell architectural shape by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

(October 2016)

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Last Monday I went to Luc Sante’s reading at Shakespeare & Co., crossing the Seine in a cold breezy evening. Sante presented some excerpts of his new book in a room packed of people, about the lives of the poor and the working class, and its “low” representatives - thugs, hustlers, whores, beggars - in a bygone Paris. He already devoted the classic Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) to the topic, but located in his hometown.

Towards the last part of the first chapter of the book the authour resumes eloquently his literary venture:

This book is not intended as a polemic, for which it’s much too late anyway. It might be something of a cenotaph-or catacomb, since it contains the skulls of vast numbers of epeople, who lived and died in Paris but would be unlikely to find a home there nowadays. Instead, I mean it mostly as a reminder of what life was like in cities when they were as vivid and savage and uncontrollable ast they were for many centuries, as expressed by Paris, the most sublime of the world’s great cities. Life was of course not all fun and games; the expression of evert sort of behavior inevitably included a great deal that was unpleasant if not inimical and even murderous.

(”Capital”, The Other Paris, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, p. 17). 

 (January 2016)

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This is a portrait of Brooklyn based artists Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie. Scott and Victoria run E.S.P. TV, an experimental platform for taping and broadcasting live events of all sorts, and they are currently preparing a coast to coast tour of the US to bring E.S.P. TV across the country. Please support these two amazing fellows by donating here to finance their project! 

(March 2015)

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Titian's portrait of Pietro Aretino (ca. 1548), as seen in the Frick collection, New York, during a visit in summer 2013. 

(August 2013)

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I visited the Frick collection in New York for the first time in summer 2013, accompanied by my friend Micah. This is a sketch I made there, inspired by the portrait of St. Jerome by El Greco (ca. 1590-1600), here depicted with a cardinal robe and resting his hands on the Latin translation of the bible. This one of the four versions produced by El Greco - another one can also be found in New York, at the Met. 

(August 2013)

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This is a detail from the amazing Tiepolo-Kabinett in the Bode museum, Berlin. The room is a small white and pastel space, with stucco ornamentations framing the frescoes by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. The works were originally conceived and made for the villa Volpato Panigai in Nervesa (ca. 1754-1759) and purchased by Wilhelm von Bode in the beginning of the XXth century. All the figures depicted are in grisaille, standing against a yellow pastel background. What is striking in those pieces is the fact that even if they are mythological subjects, the characters seem to have lost all their iconographic links, thus becoming a purely visual play. 

(August 2014)

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I came across this lamentation by Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1495) while visiting the Bode museum in Berlin. It follows more or less the same compositional scheme of the most celebrated one in Brera (1460), except that the surrounding landscape is reduced to a light blue sky (thus allowing to focus more on the gestures of the characters in the scene), and the chromatic contrasts (especially the pink and greens) are far more accentuated. 

(August 2014)

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The Bode museum in Berlin is quite well known from its important collection of Byzantine art. A few meters away from a Byzantine mosaic from Ravenna (close to my hometown) I came across this marble slab from a chancel screen (12th century Constantinople) and I sketched this detail of one of the animals hunting among vegetation.

(August 2014)

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Last summer I went to Berlin and got to visit for the first time the Bode museum. Among the various marvels that the museum has to offer, this portrait of a procurator of San Marco caught my glance for some time. It was painted by Domenico Tintoretto around 1590 and 1600. Domenico, son of Jacopo, is best know for his portraiture production and this is definitely a stunning example. Beyond the attention for the expression and gesture, what I found fascinating is the extreme precision in modeling with chiaroscuro effects the robe of the procurator. Whereas Jacopo's painting relies on the rapidity of the gesture, Domenico's strength can be found in the meticulous, almost hyperrealist, precision in such details. 

(August 2014)

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Experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr has been touring Europe recently, since his show "Bon Voyage"is currently on at Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. My friend and colleague Jonathan Pouthier has invited him for a series of screening at Centre Pompidou in Paris, in which he has shown both his classics from the 1970s (such as Reverberation, 1969, or Serene Velocity, 1970). I made this portrait of him on February 14, while he was delivering a lecture on cinema, with films from the collections of the museum. His Greenbergian approach to film lead an analysis of the works presented: a Danse Serpentine from the Lumière catalogue (1897), Helen Levitt's In the Street (1948-1952), Stan Brakhage's The Wonder Ring (1955) and his own beautiful Field (1970).

(February 2015)

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This is a portrait I made of Warren Sonbert filming with a Bolex camera (the original picture was taken by his partner at the time, Ascension Serrano). I made the drawing to promote a screening of his Carriage Trade (1972) that I will be introducing tomorrow night at University Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. The screening is part of an ongoing program entitled Invisible Cinema that I run with two fellow scholars, Benjamin Léon and Emilie Vergé. The film will be shown in a beautiful 16mm print from Light Cone. 

There is no better way to introduce Carriage Trade than this wonderful note by critic Andrew Sarris (published in The Village Voice in October 1973) found by Federico Windhausen in the Sonbert archives at Harvard:

Carriage Trade: Warren Sonbert's trips,travels and tastes arranged musically in brilliantly framed compositions and swirling camera movements. The more familiar landmarks - The Eiffel Tower, The Arch of Triumph, the Sphinx - he encloses within the quotes of jump cuts. A fascinating hour of experimenting with the notion of using visual images as musical notes. It's been done before, but seldom with such talent and high spirits. Sonbert displays an appreciation of classical cinema, an appreciation absent in the art gallery mythologies of Gregory Markopoulos or in the egoisitic anti-formalism of Stan Brakhage. Sonbert's art is not the art of displaying what he has seen.

(February 2015)

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How I ever get any object finished, especially with all the endless detail that goes into them, is always a mystery to me.

Joseph Cornell, letter to Parker Tyler, September 5, 1940.

I have been working on Joseph Cornell starting from around 2010. I wrote my MA dissertation of his films that I kept watching over and over again at a Steenbeck at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, patiently writing down all the details included in those images.  During those researches and days spent in libraries I was constantly drawing in order to memorize some of his artworks and films. 

Having been invited to give a talk on Cornell's films tonight and tomorrow at the Fine Arts museum in Lyon, where a huge retrospective of his work is currently on, I decided to take a look at my notebooks from that time. I didn't remember I had made a drawing based on a famous portrait of the artist, a photograph taken by Lee Miller in 1933-1934, showing Cornell's head behind one of his amazing assemblages. Furthermore, on the very same page of my notebook I have found this other drawing showing the Untitled (Sandbox) (ca. 1940) that belongs to the Richard Feigen collection. 

For each notebook I had selected a quote by Cornell to open my scholarly entries, I copied above the one belonging to the one in which I have found the drawings. In this very short sentence, addressed to his film critic friend Parker Tyler, a fascinating statement of poetics is resumed, with the usual modesty and reservedness of the artist from Utopia Parkway. 

(March 2011)

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Last weekend I went to the Quai Branly museum for a series of screenings of films by Robert Gardner.  Among the films screened I was particularly glad to see a gorgeous 35mm blown-up print of Forest of Bliss (1986) from the film collection of Centre Pompidou. Also, I got to see for the first time Deep Hearts (1981), a documentary about the Gerewol ceremony of the Bororo Fulani in Niger, during which the most beautiful man of the tribe is elected. My friend Jonathan described the film to me by saying that it is a sort of Jack Smith's movie in Africa, and maybe he was not far from the truth. Gardner also showed a collection of his unfinished films, entitled Forsaken Fragments, and the fantastic Rivers of Sand (1974) shot among the Hamar people, in South-West Ethiopia. 

Avoiding in most cases any sort of voice-over commentary, Gardner's frames the ethnographic experience through subtle cinematographic devices, working most notably on the disjunction of sound and image, therefore putting aside the didactical display of the actions filmed. I sketched this portrait of the filmmaker while he was discussing his work with Jean-Paul Colleyn at the museum. 

During this discussion, when asked what advice he would give to a young independent filmmaker, Gardner quoted a friend of his, the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola, who used to say in this case to his students just one word: "coraggio" (a very popular expression, that could be translate as "be brave"). Certainly things have changed from the times in which Gardner could have his experimental ethnographic documentaries produced at Harvard. 

(November 2013)