Drawing Towards a Distant Shore : Selections from Portugal

Drawing Towards a Distant Shore: Selections from Portugal featured six artists who span two generations and represent the diversity of current art production in Portugal: Rui Chafes, Gaëtan, Ana Hatherly, Ana Jotta, Pedro Proenca, and Joana Rosa.

Ana Hatherly made her first concrete poem in 1959, and from 1965 on applied herself to the intricate task of making an experimental deployment of language function as an integrally visual exercise. Her tiny, mesmerizing picture-poems, almost all of which were woven out of an impossibly dense web of cribbed words, clustered together briefly before wandering off into spiderly lines and thick, unreadable blots.

Gaëtan's entire body of work consists of self-portraits in pencil using only his left hand (he is right-handed). He insists that his works are not really self portraits, but merely drawings that take the artist's face as a starting-point. Gaëtan presented two series of near-identical portraits, in one of which the artist had built up his image through hundreds of brief flicks of the pencil, while in the other the countenance was rendered by a single unbroken line that transformed the artist's image into an anonymous "type," as if drawn by a police artist.

Pedro Proenca, who builds his imagistic vocabulary up from a vast array of sources that include comics, children's book and natural history illustrations, as well as Gothic woodcuts and his own fertile imagination, approaches his on-site creations by first developing a structural framework: a grid, labyrinth, or kind of tableau, in which the spoofing of cultural mores continually changes places with an almost naive belief in completely personal terms.

Joana Rosa also created a drawing installation, arranging on the wall hundreds of heavily worked "doodles" on vellum, forming a kind of free form collage that nonetheless permitted certain underlying motifs to emerge from the web.

 Rui Chafes presented a selection of drawings from a series entitled Nie Weider. Each of the drawings depicted five categories of images based on certain logical extremes in philosophical speculation: an anatomical or botanic detail; a geometric detail; the portrait of an intellectual; a fragment from a real or imaginary example of architecture; and a young female model slitting either her wrists or jugular vein as she placidly returns the viewer's gaze.