A Drawing Placed Between Two Objects (with Mark Manders)
From: 11.05.2016 - 2.07.2016
A Drawing Placed Between Two Objects (with Mark Manders)
A sense of its own
Marc Nagtzaam/Mark Manders
The work of Dutch artist Marc Nagtzaam stands midway between the suggestion of spaces and perspectives born out of an interest for archi-tecture, and the reflection over the formal properties of language more than over its expressive ones. Drawing is his medium of choice; his aim is organizing a picture plane that, in its apparently irretrievable austerity, is, nonetheless, equally hermetic and contingent. Nagtzaam’s practice, though, should not be reduced strictly to works on paper. In fact, they are but one symptom of the exhibition space’s proclivity towards a whole encompassing experience, here articulated on a shared musicality. With a chromatic scale in which weightless shades of grey find their place between black and white spaces, a fluctuating group of lines and strips (depending on their variable density) populates the surface according to rhythmic permutations. In these works on paper we observe a sort of grid structure that organizes itself through combinatory processes. However, this is a ductile structure, not a strict or even a dogmatic one. As it should: the inalienable freedom with which the artist infuses his pencil can in no way be undermined by the idealized reticula. The opposite takes place, though, with narrative: taken from all sorts of publications, the language that often dominates his drawings is no more than a frustrated impulse, a jaded ready-made, in any case unfit for narrative.