Quappi Projects | Louisville, KY
Jan 21 - Feb 26
Visage (stale), 2021
watercolor graphite on watercolor paper over panel
18 x 24 x 7/8 inches
Quappi Projects is pleased to present Slow Songs, a group exhibition celebrating and exploring the immediacy, intimacy, complexity, and continuation of drawing. Frequently associated with historical artists like Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Egon Schiele, and Francisco Goya, drawing endures as an integral part of the respective practices of countless contemporary artists, including the fifteen from North and South America collected here, whose diverse works will be on view for the next five weeks.
“Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality,” declared the great Edgar Degas. More than simply another species of writing, drawing preceded the advent of written language and remains, millennia later, a compelling and indelible form of expression and communication. Perhaps more than any other form of visual art, drawing possesses a direct and obvious connection to the practiced synthesis between hand and eye; whether it be a pencil, a pen, or a small brush, the tools employed in the act of drawing suggest an extension of the hand or the finger, eliciting memories and an acute clarity that speaks to something deep within us. Because most of us drew at some point in our childhood—even if it isn’t something we now do—we understand the pleasures and frustrations of making lines and shapes, and know the feeling of altering the face of the earth by making a mark in the sand or the dirt with a finger or a stick or other found implement. It is, in many ways, precisely this economy of means and sense of the elementary that makes drawing so appealing and accessible, yet neither these descriptions nor any other parameters fully encompass its history, breadth, and possibilities. Quieter than painting, softer than sculpture, more archaic than NFTs, drawings are akin to ballads and slow songs: they can dazzle, but often do so with some delay, revealing both their depth and subtlety over time and with repeated consideration.
—John Brooks
