“There is no picture. There is a comparison.
All round is the collection. There are parts anyway.”
Gertrude Stein, “Scenes. Actions and Dispositions of Relations and Positions“, Geography and Plays, 1910-1920
In 2016, artist and architect José Quintanar embarked on a research process aimed at exploring the possibilities of drawing, beginning with the representation of landscape as a starting point. In this process – which is still ongoing –, Quintanar approaches drawing from various perspectives: certainly as a representation technique, but also as a constructive and deconstructive method, as a space for playful exploration, as a testing ground for the logic of visual composition and even as a suggestive sign-based calligraphy.
For Quintanar, “The drawing of a landscape is not only its representation, but also its transformation.” As it reconfigures the very idea of representation, the drawing simultaneously becomes a trace and a tool, projecting itself both backward and forward: it records and preserves in time a fleeting glimpse of the past, but its lines also contain infinite possibilities for recombination in the future.
The Dutch Landscape series articulates the multiple results that Quintanar’s research has generated: drawings – sometimes unique pieces, sometimes printed in series –; fold-out prints; booklets of a varying number of pages, but also pre-existing publications “parasitised“ by an artist’s intervention; flags and banners; or installations that present fleeting three-dimensional drawings, whose strokes are black ribbons hanging from the walls. For any of these variables, the working method always begins at the same point: with the freehand drawing of a landscape, whose strokes, back in the studio, are broken down into independent lines that will later be recombined according to specific but ever-changing rules, which Quintanar constantly reinvents, in order to narrow the range of possibilities of each new formalization.
At the Galerie Florence Loewy, the three most recent materializations of Dutch Landscape are now being presented simultaneously. All three take as their starting point the same drawing from 2019 consisting of 41 strokes, but develop in different ways:
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In this first exercise, the 41 strokes of the original drawing become as many wooden rulers that are stored inside a box, like utensils ready for use. Thus, they cease to be mere disembodied lines and become material objects with a thickness and weight that, nevertheless, keep intact their potential to be rearranged in infinite ways. During this exhibition, the wooden rulers leave the box and expand throughout the gallery space, filling it, so to speak, with a three-dimensional, ephemeral drawing that will disappear as soon as the show ends and the rulers return to their box.
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The second formalization consists of a series of drawings with colored pencil on paper, made using the 41 wooden rulers, which show just some of the possible recombinations of the strokes of the original drawing. The creation of these drawings is a reflective and slow process, which leaves no room for the spontaneity of the original freehand drawing. As a result, strokes are arranged on the paper in different orderings that are also sui generis classification systems. In them, the original representation is barely a remnant, although it does not disappear completely.
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Finally, the original drawing of a landscape is transferred to publication format: the wooden rulers are scanned, and the resulting digital images are distributed over the eight pages of a booklet. Strokes regain, to a certain extent, their original two?dimensionality, although they are still represented as material objects. With their new arrangement, they also expand the traces of the first drawn image along a sequence that unfolds gradually, following the rhythm of the pages, before the reader’s eyes.
These three new instances of Dutch Landscape show how the project continues to grow, both in the perceptible space of the gallery and in the territory of the imaginary or intangible. The relationship between “the parts” and “the whole” is broken down into multiple levels of correspondence, ranging from the connections between the strokes themselves and the original drawing from which they originate, to the tension between each of the project’s materializations and the whole of them, to the links between the various drawings that result from each new formalization. These levels of correspondence also extend over time: some elements are linked diachronically, when they are created or presented simultaneously, while others are synchronically connected in a temporal cadence that is not necessarily regular, but persevering.
Representation is thus analyzed, decomposed, transformed and recomposed incessantly as each of these new experiments in visual depiction materializes. By different means and with multiple methods, Dutch Landscape pushes experimentation beyond materiality, projecting drawing towards the realm of ideas, and overflowing the paper to invade impalpable spaces that widen the limits of its possibilities to unsuspected extremes.
Text by Mela Dávila Freire
