Vincent Bizien Catharina van Eetvelde Simon Faithfull Patrick Martinez Fleur Noguera Mike Rogers Justin Storms

A few years after the previous episode, Drawing Quirks 3 re-launches our investigation into the contemporary relevance of certain idiosyncratic drawing practices. With the relative rarity of images made by human hand accelerating by the millisecond (in the face of the tsunami of computer-generated images), could it be that the shock of the old is increasing, endowing drawing, for example, with renewed pertinence, potential and desire in the eye of the beholder?

Drawing Quirks 3, offers diverse and refreshingly quirky drawing practices through a selection of works including a number of animated films. In his large ink drawings, Vincent Bizien has developed personal metaphors and symbolism in which both abstract marks and rudimentary spaces and figures combine. Catherina van Eetvelde bears interesting witness to a love-hate relationship with fragments of flow charts, graphic schemas and such, infiltrated by more personalized, yet equally obsessive iconography. Simon Faithfull also turns the tables on the digital world in his palm pilot drawings, made directly from observation, and instantly translated into pixels, to be etched or animated. Patrick Martinez has also turned certain drawings into animation, but his immediate tool is nothing more sophisticated than an eraser. In his more recent series of ballpoint doodles, titled Spinheads, images emerge from a flow of consciousness to be viewed from any angle. Fleur Noguera takes us on a similarly dreamy journey through landscapes that seem both familiarly contemporary and nostalgically timeless, in both drawings and her animation film: Smoke. Mike Rogers presents a new version of the drawings he showed in Drawing Quirks 2, -banal suburban interiors and exteriors, transformed by obsessive and intricately exotic decorative elements, rendered here in the strangely soft hues of school-issue colored pencils. Finally, Justin Storms’ minutely detailed drawings take us deliberately back in time into the misty and barbaric world of 17th Century whaling. For all the romantic cruelty that Storms depicts, the power and subtlety of his work also owes something to our awareness that the barbarism of modern man has created devastation on an incomparable scale. Ultimately Drawing Quirks 3 seeks to present multiple aspects of the use of “old” drawing techniques, which can optimize contemporary attitudes and vision in artists’ relationships to the world.

Simon Faithfull, Patrick Martinez and Mike Rogers are represented in the USA by Parker’s Box; Vincent Bizien is represented by Galerie Trafic, Paris; Catherina van Eetvelde by Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris; Simon Faithfull by Galerie Polaris, Paris; and Mike Rogers by Rachmaninoff’s, London, and Galerie Cosar HMT, Düsseldorf.

Recent shows by participating artists include Vincent Bizien at Galerie Trafic, Paris (current); Catharina van Eetvelde at the St. Louis Art Museum; Simon Faithfull at the 52nd Venice Biennale; Patrick Martinez at The Showroom, London; Fleur Noguera at the Contemporary Art Center, Sête, France; Mike Rogers at ADN Galleria, Barcelona, and Justin Storms at Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Berlin.