DRAWING IS A LONELY PLACE

an exhibition curated by João dos Santos

My relationship with landscape has always been deep, being in the middle of it a natural state. Having carried out an artist residency, in August 2017, at LAC - Laboratório de Atividades Criativas, in Lagos, Portugal, allowed a total immersion in the environment of the Bravura Dam, and made the landscape a theme worked systematically in my work. Although the drawings made were not completely solved, this period of work was instrumental in starting an investigation that is permanently with an open end - Open Endedness -, since fortunately I have not yet found a definitive answer to the problem of landscape representation.

I keep in mind that what we call nature is far from any idea of wild or untouched, since the entire landscape through which I move is manipulated and managed. Even so, being in the middle of nature is a very intense, immersive experience that needs the mediation of drawing. I feel that my attention is activated when I am in the middle of nature, that I am more aware of my surroundings, since I am working from a certain situation and not in a familiar or neutral environment. The temperatures, sounds, and smells allow me to feel that I belong there. Sometimes I work naked to be more unprotected, to feel everything more intensely, to become part of the ecosystem. Drawing in water also allows me to promote a more immersive experience, increasing my understanding of the materiality of water and its surface rhythms. The meditative character of my drawing is based on a deep practice of anthropophagy, evidenced by the absence of human presences. Even in the drawings that represent moments of my travels on highways or urban suburbs there is a melancholy caused by the ambivalence between the convenience of the road infrastructure and the destruction of the natural territory.

The periods of formal or informal artistic residency and the walks result in a large number of drawings in sketchbooks. My curiosity is constant and my feet need unknown terrain. Part of the time spent in the landscape consists of lengthy and meditative observation, the gaze is critical and rarely distracted like that of a tourist, in search of an understanding deeper than the superficial and descriptive. The modules and rhythms of landscape formation allow the construction of a drawing on the edge of figuration that is both interpretive and diaristic.

All the fieldwork is later filtered in the studio into enlarged and materially altered versions. Reworking the drawings allows a recovery of sensory memories that are expressed through written sentences that complement the drawings, through free associations of ideas and memories recovered by looking at the notebook pages.

In nature I find traces of animal life (bones, shells, corpses) that I often collect. Some of these samples are drawn on site, others in the studio. These drawings add scale to the idea of landscape, allow the attention to be multiplied between the detail and the panoramic view. The shell of an oyster can take on the visual presence of a mountain, only the origin of the drawing distinguishes them.

The animations intend to recover sequential memories of the experience of being in the middle of the landscape. In them I explore the materiality of drawing to obtain an analog and rudimentary language to counteract the digital aesthetics where they are edited. I am interested that the animations complement and extend the time contained in the static drawings through the use of the same graphic language.

May, 2023

Jorge Leal