Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art is pleased to present 'On Drawing', an exhibition of recent/new drawings by five Portuguese artists: Diogo Pimentão, José Loureiro, Pedro Calapez, Rui Toscano and Joana Rosa.

As the title 'On Drawing' advances, this show provides multiple perspectives on drawing without submitting the subject to a unifying or globalising view, envisioned as a starting point or theme for a potential debate or dialogue on drawing.

For Jacques Derrida, 'Graphematics' informs all experience, which suggests that drawing informs all 'experience'.

The beginning is of the order of the trace, the order of drawing. Given that drawing is of the order of the beginning, these terms are interchangeable. Thus all beginnings draw the traits of drawing into play. The beginning as the delineation, vestige, trace or search for the origin or history of something or someone; drawing as deciphering, discovering, ascertaining by investigation; the trace as delineation, the drawing of an outline or figure, the marking or mark upon or embellishment with lines, figures or characters. For Alan Cholodenko in The Illusion of the Beginning: A Theory of Drawing and Animation, 'the trace is the differance which opens appearance and signification'. Essentially, drawing as a concept is disseminative and complex, escaping permanence and fixation, for drawing draws and withdraws itself, just like the idea of origin – the trace. As Heidegger remarked 'Diese Zeichnung ist der Riss', riss being the tear, the interval, the in-between, a site of passage. Drawing as delineation (drawing, sketch, outline – dessin in French) and design (plan – dessein).

Drawing as the survey and command of nature, through the illustrations of man's milieu in caves, is recognized as being at the 'origin' of all art. These first drawings developed into the forms adopted in architecture, sculpture and painting. During the Renaissance, drawing gained a prominent role as a symbol of creativity and ingenuity. The force of line is the principle that determines the application of colour in painting. Leonardo da Vinci saw drawing as the 'divine science', a process of creative knowledge.

If there is anything relatively consensual to be said about drawing, it may be that drawing is a formative experience which encapsulates all types of manifestations: drawing as process (referred to art that bears the traces of its own making over time, privileging the presence of the artist's hand and its experiential nature) or finished/precise work (as opposed to be found through the process of making, 'projective' drawings), immediate, unmediated works and lengthy, construed drawings. Nevertheless, none of these categories can currently be considered exclusive.

'On Drawing' presents pieces that are neither a preparatory study, nor a minor adjunct to the finished work, but varied approaches to drawing; elaborate propositions that reflect the artists' concern with the employment and problems of the medium. A potential reading into these works, which is mostly latent to each work, is that of dérive (as the technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences) or the attitude of drifting through art, drawing and its conventions.

In the drawing of Diogo Pimentão (Lisbon, 1973), the artist's hand drifts repeatedly over the large sheet of paper, invariably renewing each mark. In some works, the lines that comprise the fine fabric of what is seen emerge from friction, the result of an almost performative event. The density and opacity of Pimentão's works reflects the result of a delicate process of priming the paper with a carefully laid down acrylic gesso surface which is delicately sanded and thinned to welcome his graphite drawings. These works render living pools of mercury that reflect light, obliging the viewer to come close and withdraw from this dark mirror. His drawings define the space of drawing (the space that is occupied by drawing), but they also translate a definition of space that is distinct from the illusionistic space defined in traditional drawing through the use of figure/ground relationships and other devices. Although Pimentão's works are seen flat against the wall, there is a tacit physicality to the drawings that defines the space in front of them, so as to suggest the room occupied during their process of creation and fruition.

For José Loureiro (Mangualde, 1961), drawing is substance. The coupled strokes in Loureiro's works are drawn in such a manner that the eye is impelled to following them lengthwise, from left to right, top to bottom. These four graphite drawings vertiginously repeat these curvilinear and unstable lines which reverberate and destabilize the gaze. José Loureiro liberates his gesture with his automated drawings, covering his visual scores with accord. He does not seek to fix or represent something but to seize an energy. This linear energy determines direction, rate of motion, force of motion – accelerations, smoothness, heaviness, lightness, brokenness, continuity, sharpness – pulsations that relate and release themselves from the sheet of paper, gaining dimension and extension as they simultaneously resonate inner tension.

Pedro Calapez (Lisbon, 1953) drifts through the conventions of drawing, namely the conventions of landscape drawing, an activity that has occupied his attention, which is brought once more to the centre stage of his work. Whereas the naturalist painter takes the landscape as a whole, the parts of his work arranged in order to render unity and recognition, translating a landscape inhabited by articulate and stable meanings, Pedro Calapez chooses to act in the sense of eliminating any expression of reality. In this case, Calapez selects fragments of images of water lines and a conventional landscape and transforms them into abstract graphic registers. Both conventions, one of relief, that other evoking the landscape genre, are equalized by the final graphic result.

Rui Toscano's (Lisbon, 1970) drawings with permanent marking pen translate an exercise of observation that empties places of identity and the artist state of arrest by architecture as a timeless and undetermined space. These drawings adopt and adapt the language of architectural illustration, often choosing to represent or 'project' details and unusual views according to this language. Whereas photography is the direct referent of these works, these drawing direct us towards reality, they are a semblance of the real. Regarding the city, Donatella Mazzoleni's words, quoted in 'The City in The Field of Vision' (in Into the Image, Kevin Robins, ed. Routledge, 1996, 133), significantly resound on viewing Toscano's drawings: ' 'Metropolises are no longer 'places', because their dimensions exceed by far the dimensions of the perceptive apparatus of their inhabitants. The widest sensory aperture, that of light, is shattered. It was the visual field, in some respect, which defined the city dimensionally: in the metropolis there is no longer pan-orama (the vision of all), because its body overflows beyond the horizon. In the metropolitan aesthetic the eye fails in its role as an instrument of total control at a distance'.

Last but not least, Joana Rosa (Lisbon, 1959) presents 'Scribble', an extensive graphite drawing with annotations of red pastel on vellum that results from the ample register of dense, turbulently drawn patterns. This scribble is a sort of metaphor for the process of thought and work that is unrestricted, unrestrained, open-ended and arbitrary, sprawling throughout the artist's oeuvre. The words and statements written in this work underline the feeling of vertigo that swallows reality and the pleasures of the childhood imagination, narrative, science fiction and ballet. The dimension of process deserves to be especially remarked in this work, rendered by the traces left behind by the artist and vestiges of family life, a subtle reference to maternity and the umbilical cord, the threshold of life.

Nancy Dantas