Outpost Correspondence 270224
Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton
The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman
Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.
Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.
* The haptic engagement.
* The stage of drawing.
* Gesture and act.
Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.
To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.
— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman
Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.
Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.
The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.
The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.
Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.
Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.
For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.
## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds
Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.
### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)
Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.
The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.
In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.
Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.
Ina Macaione, 2017.
## Enric Mestre
### Architectures for Silence and Meditation
Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.
Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.
Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.
His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.
Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.
Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.
Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.
— David Whiting
## Invisible Cities
*Italo Calvino*
"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules
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