DELFIM SARDO
published in the 2007 EDP New Artists Award catalogue.
In this award, the nature of drawing series and opened to more than one creator were exhibited.
In this award, the nature of drawing series and opened to more than one creator were exhibited.
(translation by José Gabriel Flores and José Manuel Godinho)
THE DAILY PRACTICE OF DRAWING
Drawing is Daniel Melim’s main occupation.
Occupation and not ‘technique’, or ‘support’, because drawing has been evolving in his yet brief career in a continuous and systematic way, much like a permanent activity where there is no distinction between its theoretical and development components.
Drawing is unlike any other artistic discipline, as it does not have, from long ago, any barrier which defines a canon or sets a hierarchy of procedures. In Melim’s drawing practice, this anti-disciplinary possibility comes as a test bench that questions the holistic components of the artistic practice, knowing that in the plurality of devices and methodologies developed by Daniel Melim there is no foreshow of any archival system of drawing, but rather a continuum in which different methodologies and procedures all contribute to a critical experience of drawing.
A variety of drawing typologies can be found in Daniel Melim’s contribution to this exhibition, disseminated in the multiplicity of approaches presented by the artist.
On the tables, you may find drawings which are part of Melim’s own selection out of a much wider production. In the typologies shown, all done in the same media format, there are drawings using various drawing materials (pencils, India ink, ball pens, felt markers), as well as coloured drawings (water-colours and colour pencils); and also clearly figurative drawings, i.e., the so-called ‘contour drawing’, frequently of domestic situations or landscapes; there are also evasive and evanescent drawings which occupy the page in a moderate way, quite close to doodles, i.e., to drawings that are informal and of involuntary composition. There are also drawings arising out of very diverse expressive typologies: from drawings which, in a musical way, follow the tension of the visible field, some quite close to the proposals of landscape drawing of Joao Queiroz, to others which, on the contrary, set out of more or less rigorous markings on the page, as if focused solely on the line’s own discipline, in a linguistic and analytical way
At the core of this world made of a multiplicity of procedures, there is yet another significant difference between drawings that embody an accidental or voluntary structural narrative (which nature is never clear), obtained by way of inscribing notes, numbers, sums, or text. These notes may well be visual records, similar to preparatory notes of something that is sometimes found in a different scale or place, but which is mostly to be found as an internal reference of the drawing itself, replicated in a mise-en-abyme.
There is a second cleavage in the apparently encyclopaedic collection of drawings scattered on the tables, one that may only be perceived by the spectator but never expressed by the artist, wich resides in the authorial sharing of some drawings: in the disparate map of procedures one may find, there is a set of drawings that correspond to invitations extended by the artist to other people (artists or otherwise) to draw something. Melim will draw, again, over those drawings. It is never clear whether this is a collaborative work, i.e., authorial sharing, a dissolution of the authorship issue, or regarding drawing as an activity that can be exercised in an ‘all-terrain’ mode – any support is a valid one, including the one already taken up by another drawing.
Apart from the drawings on the tables, Daniel Melim also uses the wall, on which he made a drawing. It is a magnification of a previously projected drawing, thereby making a meta-drawing, i.e., the drawing of a drawing, which in turn was already the representation of a landscape, i.e., configured as a standard representational process. In this meandering through successive layers or instances of representation there is a play on an expressive loss, a transformation of the hand that, differing intensities, had defined a partition of the visible into a second non-expressive methodology, almost documental and clearly graphic.
Daniel Melim’s approach to drawing consists in the establishment of a fluid field, a continuum of practice and reflection on itself (and also the acknowledgement of the body itself), having ‘drawing’ as a discipline without a canon. Symptomatically, at the core of his work there is a belief in that drawing is the most democratic transversal field amongst all artistic practices and none- artistic exploratory activities. In that sense, Daniel Melim’s project, namely the one now shown, configures a developing programme of an understanding of drawing as a cross-disciplinary performing activity. Its poetics lies in that permeability.
Drawing is Daniel Melim’s main occupation.
Occupation and not ‘technique’, or ‘support’, because drawing has been evolving in his yet brief career in a continuous and systematic way, much like a permanent activity where there is no distinction between its theoretical and development components.
Drawing is unlike any other artistic discipline, as it does not have, from long ago, any barrier which defines a canon or sets a hierarchy of procedures. In Melim’s drawing practice, this anti-disciplinary possibility comes as a test bench that questions the holistic components of the artistic practice, knowing that in the plurality of devices and methodologies developed by Daniel Melim there is no foreshow of any archival system of drawing, but rather a continuum in which different methodologies and procedures all contribute to a critical experience of drawing.
A variety of drawing typologies can be found in Daniel Melim’s contribution to this exhibition, disseminated in the multiplicity of approaches presented by the artist.
On the tables, you may find drawings which are part of Melim’s own selection out of a much wider production. In the typologies shown, all done in the same media format, there are drawings using various drawing materials (pencils, India ink, ball pens, felt markers), as well as coloured drawings (water-colours and colour pencils); and also clearly figurative drawings, i.e., the so-called ‘contour drawing’, frequently of domestic situations or landscapes; there are also evasive and evanescent drawings which occupy the page in a moderate way, quite close to doodles, i.e., to drawings that are informal and of involuntary composition. There are also drawings arising out of very diverse expressive typologies: from drawings which, in a musical way, follow the tension of the visible field, some quite close to the proposals of landscape drawing of Joao Queiroz, to others which, on the contrary, set out of more or less rigorous markings on the page, as if focused solely on the line’s own discipline, in a linguistic and analytical way
At the core of this world made of a multiplicity of procedures, there is yet another significant difference between drawings that embody an accidental or voluntary structural narrative (which nature is never clear), obtained by way of inscribing notes, numbers, sums, or text. These notes may well be visual records, similar to preparatory notes of something that is sometimes found in a different scale or place, but which is mostly to be found as an internal reference of the drawing itself, replicated in a mise-en-abyme.
There is a second cleavage in the apparently encyclopaedic collection of drawings scattered on the tables, one that may only be perceived by the spectator but never expressed by the artist, wich resides in the authorial sharing of some drawings: in the disparate map of procedures one may find, there is a set of drawings that correspond to invitations extended by the artist to other people (artists or otherwise) to draw something. Melim will draw, again, over those drawings. It is never clear whether this is a collaborative work, i.e., authorial sharing, a dissolution of the authorship issue, or regarding drawing as an activity that can be exercised in an ‘all-terrain’ mode – any support is a valid one, including the one already taken up by another drawing.
Apart from the drawings on the tables, Daniel Melim also uses the wall, on which he made a drawing. It is a magnification of a previously projected drawing, thereby making a meta-drawing, i.e., the drawing of a drawing, which in turn was already the representation of a landscape, i.e., configured as a standard representational process. In this meandering through successive layers or instances of representation there is a play on an expressive loss, a transformation of the hand that, differing intensities, had defined a partition of the visible into a second non-expressive methodology, almost documental and clearly graphic.
Daniel Melim’s approach to drawing consists in the establishment of a fluid field, a continuum of practice and reflection on itself (and also the acknowledgement of the body itself), having ‘drawing’ as a discipline without a canon. Symptomatically, at the core of his work there is a belief in that drawing is the most democratic transversal field amongst all artistic practices and none- artistic exploratory activities. In that sense, Daniel Melim’s project, namely the one now shown, configures a developing programme of an understanding of drawing as a cross-disciplinary performing activity. Its poetics lies in that permeability.