Instructions for inhabiting the drawing

I
Cromoterapia, sculptor Nani Cárdenas’ project developed immediately before this one, arrived to a particular understanding of the spatial drawing from the point of view of fabric. Shapeable and slender telecommunication cables were deployed in the emptiness of the room as colorful networks that draw the promise of a living figure –be it human, plant or animal– and then reduce themselves to simple, pure forms: the running line, the knot. But it wasn’t just the pleasure of drawing in space that was then involved: in its clear material resignification, Cromoterapia symbolized both an expectation and a vestige of communication.
This double burden of meaning remains in Cuaderno de dibujo, only this time, the profusely recycled cable embraces even more fields of representation. It also imposes a dramatic change of perspective. If in Cromoterapia the point of departure to reach the drawing was fabric, the strategy now turns 180 degrees and shows its opposite: the drawing is the starting point to reach, sometimes, an embroidery that sits between an image of intimacy and an unique expressionist affiliation; and to arrive, some other times, to a sophisticated spatial design that frees imagination to inhabit the drawing; the body-design relation fantasy.
II
Like other artists, Cárdenas usually accompanies everyday life with notebooks intervened with collages, drawings and texts. These books work as graphic diaries, and show a will for immediacy, an unmediated emotional record. It all begins there for Cuaderno de dibujo. And the project's first stop, Hojas sueltas, is the result of what is at stake when it comes to translating the images of those books to a wire and thread embroidery on canvas. What is lost and what is gained in this operation? What new promises of meaning are summoned? In Hojas sueltas, the typical associations offered by the notion of embroidery (sensitivity, utilitarian value) are convincingly subverted, approaching an emancipatory vocation, an ethics of sensibility. The wire is stretched tight and contracted and even plays at symbolizing the free-hand drawing speed that is beyond the canvas and takes over the air, the limits of convention.
III
A group of gracefully corporeal forms inhabit the Apuntes a lápiz installation. By molding the brown and white telephone wires, each piece stands for a typical sketch of a moving human figure. Only that the scale is real, and the incomplete figure, floating or barely sustained in a frozen dance movement, summons other apparently ambiguous similarities: the inhabited silence of a forest, or a frightening butcher’s freezer, if we are extremely apprehensive. Apuntes a lápiz invites us to penetrate its own organism, measuring ourselves up to it. And in the footprints left by our steps on the quartz dust (imagined as a rainfall of chalk dust), we witness the registry of drawing in emptiness; the registry of air –the nothing, the pure will– as support for the drawing.
IV
Tinta negra’s thick strike cables –it isn’t gratuitous that the technical name of the material is "strike"– are also expressionist high-voltage conductors, only they aren’t confronted with a bidimensional format but rather fully appropriate their space. A device that plays to fixating and keeping the speed of a bold trace of heroic dimensions, Tinta negra is actually an installation that gravitates around the notions of passion and persistence: the great figures only exist from the waist down; they only exist to go forward and to desire. And the power of such a drawing –the heavy drops that fall and accumulate in huge amounts– is translated to sculpture. In other words, it frees itself.
Diego Otero, march 2009