Carbon

Carbon is the chemical element that is found in both graphite and charcoal, and that makes it probably one of the oldest materials ever used to make art.

During the Paleolithic era, caveman would use various natural pigments to realize their cave paintings. Reds were made with iron oxide, white with grounded calcite and black with charcoal.

While natural pigments are still used in painting, charcoal is the most common tool that was used by artists, apprentice, students, amateur artist, and anyone who ever wanted to try making some art. It is one of the most accessible and primal tool.

Prehistorical art is all about making a mark and leaving a trace behind. In our modern times we make a trace every day. Randomly doodling when bored, writing an address down or making a grocery list. All these are mundane actions, but they are still the physical mark of someone’s thoughts, life and words.

When reflecting on that idea, I cannot think of one home I visited in my life and that did not have at least one pencil.

Carolee Schneemann is an artist for whom movement, and the space that occupies the body is central to her art practice. She often uses the word “kinetic” to talk about her work.

In her performance Up to and Including her limits, Schneemann places herself in a tree surgeon harness that is floating in between three big sheets of paper (on the walls and floor). While she in using crayons (and not charcoal, as I thought when first seeing the black and white picture) she, like O’Hara want to capture and transcribe movements onto a paper. She explains that her first interest doing so was because she initially wanted to see how it felt like to be in a harness and let is sway, surrendering the body to the sensation of floating and being moved by an external object attached to the body. It is actually a in between control and letting go, because the harness makes her sway, but each movement will be influenced by the way and the intensity in which the crayon hits the walls. She adds, that she was inspired by Pollock’s action painting, wanting to include the whole body and the space into the making of a work.

Here again, as mentioned, we almost feel that this approach is a playful way of approaching mark making; I make a random and half accidental line on a wall as I am swaying in the air, to which another line is going to add itself, over and over.

Putting these three artists next to each other, the common thread that connects them is this desire of making a random mark onto a white surface, but using rhythm, movements and space as tools that are almost more important that the material itself and then the result. It is the experience of the action being made and being materialized into a line (a mark) that is important here, It is wanting to give a shape and form to things that initially don’t have one, things that belong to the empty space and live in our imagination and that only live and dies in the same instant.

The movement of a head going left and right, that feels like a nod, like a way of saying no, would never be registered normally, but here, every time her heads goes from one side to another, each single movement leaves  its trace.

American abstract expressionist artist Cy Twombly’s work is a never-ending poetry of scribbles. When seeing his work in the flesh for the first time in Paris (Centre Pompidou) I was accompanied by two friends who were quite unsettled (to say the least) when first seeing his work, and had a hard time understanding why I would spend minutes on end looking at what they called “a child’s first discovery of a pencil”. They were not completely wrong there, and this is probably the most charming and touching part of Twombly’s work. We was always an advocate for “ugly handwritings” and children’s drawings.

Art in the popular culture, is always thought to be full of “skills” and by skills I mean a perfect notion of perspective, light and shadow, depth, anatomy, in short of everything that would demonstrate of a level of accuracy when representing reality. But here, we are faced with the celebration of imperfection, imprecision, and approximation.

When trying to think of the shape of our thoughts, their colors, their logic, and the way they connect to each other they are far from being straightforward and completely clear, and being comforted to Twombly’s paintings I always feel I am having a peak at what’s happening inside his head, of as if his thoughts just exploded onto the surface he is working on with no filter and control, in all honestly. There is something very freeing in his work, as if he was forcing us to tap into our inner child part and reconnect with our first experience of holding a pen and enjoying the simple act of leaving a mark and of realizing that our movements can actually create something, whatever this thing is and looks like.