You want it darker
Performative Installation
Paris/Stuttgart, 2016-2018
Visitors are invited to experience individually and equipped a torch a completly dark room with charcoal drawings.
charcoal on paper: 2,4 m x 2,8 m (1 drawing)
30 cm x 42 (5 drawings)
16 cm x 12 cm (150 drawings)
After completing my studies and seemingly very close to the “great” freedom, great fear seized me. Without the supposed security of the academy and my familiar environment, I saw myself at the mercy and overwhelmed with the demands of independent artistic creation. To deal with this fear and to make it tangible, I used the surrealist technique of ‘écriture automatique’. For a month I drew with charcoal in various paper formats to the point of physical exhaustion. The resulting drawings fill a dark room that visitors can explore individually and with a flashlight.
“You want it darker? We kill the flame”, Leonard Cohen sings in his very last album. The eponymous series of charcoal drawings explores the very matter of drawing itself: Mythologically, at least, drawing is said to have originated from the practice of fixating silhouettes, from outlining the shadows of objects and faces cast by a fire. You Want it Darker reflects this mythological heritage by using charcoal, a remainder of a flame long extinguished, to create an excessive amount of strokes, traces. All that is left on the paper are some vague silhouettes of lighter, diffuse forms (just the opposite of the logic of the silhouette drawings) surrounded by the dark. It is this ambiguous move that drawing entails, to create and to kill – in order to create a trace, the drawn object must be already absent – which drives You Want it Darker.
Text by Charlotte Klink
