Charlika - Drawings & such

video installation: Smooth Sailing @ Galeria Malarstwa ASP w Krakowie, PL

SMOOTH SAILING

An exploration of the mystery of the inner and outside world in drawings. My research is gestural, graphic, spiritual. A central theme, the distance in time and space between people and places. This gap of distance composes a parallel world, close to ours yet floating, evanescent, happening in multiple locations simultaneously as viewers venture through the images.

In fact, each viewer may adapt the image to his own experience, opinion, desire and takes part in the process of creation as he sees the image and builds his own vision of it. It is a profound intimate experience, art as interlocutor, a trip inside one’s self. The viewer becomes the author of his own particular version of the image. A drawing, a painting, a video seen by ten viewers results in ten versions of it.

Once a drawing is made, it does not belong to me anymore. I only retain my own vision of it.

I present a series of image sequences in contact with two juxtaposed videos. In the first, the tools and materials used are authentic, organic. Charcoal, paper. Hands, fingers, palms. Gesture drawing as instinctive movement and direct contact with the support and the image, saving the traces of the action.

Videos, on the other hand, are intangible images, reproductions. In the first video, the camera records images of drawings. The camera has an other understanding of the phenomenon before the lens. As a tool for exploration, it produces a different perspective, continuously moving, showing the world as only it can see. In the second video, lights blinking in the dark, signals, unexplainable codes of a parallel world where some items are definite and the rest is unrecognisable, vanishing. As the lights suffocate, they blink.

Drawings and videos are present together as sequences of images: the works communicate within themselves as well as one with the other: as they are juxtaposed, more sense and even narrative quality emerge through the space between the images. This effect is similar to the gutter or space between the panels of a graphic novel as our imagination takes the two images boarding the gutter and transforms them into a single idea. Sequences of images turn into bodies of implicit narration; drawing becomes writing with images.

In film, the position of the images is the same: the images are shown one on top of the other, on one screen. It moves in time, space is unchanged. In film, the images and narration are fed to the viewer. It is the opposite with drawings are they are presented on multiple screens one next to the other. Time is static, the sequence develops through space and the viewer moves alongside it. His role is active as he makes decisions of what, how long and where to look, he may select all the images at once or none of them. The viewer becomes the place of sense as he attaches his own private meaning to the images.

Like Caspar Friedrich’s Nebelmeer, images are like landscapes, visions of the inside world, contemplated and explored by the traveller. They are dramatic; propitious for a metaphysical or spiritual escape as while eye-travelling the images one might explore his or her own self. Je suis un bateau battu par les vagues, la tempête est intérieure. I am a boat swayed by the waves, the storm is inside.