Paintings & Drawings2018produced

CAUSTIC

Sodium hypochlorite drawn on black paper. Cluj-Napoca, 2018.

Upper half of a black sheet carrying a grid of invented glyphs, a dotted constellation, a triangle and a field of dots; the lower half opens into a wide mottled burst of bleached gold and brown.

A seated figure drawn in fine pale bleach lines at the centre of a black sheet, with three bars of invented glyphs above it and the number string 1248103117 in the top right corner. — Figure with script bars and number string. Sodium hypochlorite on paper, 2018.

A large pale gold disc high on a black sheet, a thin bright horizon line across the middle, and a mottled brown field of bleached paper filling the lower half. — Moon above a horizon, with the sheet flooded below the line.

Sodium hypochlorite drawn onto black paper. The bleach lifts the dye out of the sheet, so every mark arrives pale, gold, ochre, sometimes close to bone. Nothing is added to the paper. The image is what the paper gives up.

Close photograph of black paper showing its grain, with a small pale cartouche drawn in bleach reading NIN JAH, a run drip below it and soft bleached blooms to the right. — Detail. The paper grain and a named cartouche, roughly life size.

A small standing figure in a wide hat on a low horizon, beneath a sky of swirling yellow bleach clouds and pale moons on near-black paper. — Standing figure under bleach clouds.

The line cannot be taken back. Bleach keeps working after the brush leaves, creeping into the fibre, so a stroke set down thin can open into a cloud by morning. He built a script to live in that: bars of invented glyphs, number strings, single standing or seated figures, constellations joined by ruled lines. Signs that behave like a language without ever being one.

A wide montage tiling more than a hundred small bleach drawings together, figures, constellations, moons, glyph bars and diagrams, all pale gold on black. — Montage sheet. The whole run laid out at once.

An almost empty black sheet with a soft gold disc upper left, a small four-point constellation upper right, and a large X of two ruled lines with round nodes at their ends. — Constellation. Four nodes and two ruled lines.

Made through 2018 and shown that May at Galeria Casa Matei in Cluj-Napoca. One montage sheet lays the whole run out side by side, and the vocabulary reads plainly there, the same handful of signs, turned over and over. Related experiments on fabric, on coloured paper, and folded into small books are catalogued separately.

Medium: Sodium hypochlorite on paper
Materials: Sodium hypochlorite (household bleach), Black paper
Dimensions: Sheets, dimensions variable
Role: Artist