Seven Sins II : charcoal montages (2022)

I proceeded this way: I would copy and enhance certain of the worked on graphic elements previously shown and would then combine them into line drawings on A2 format. Since I elaborated these new montage drawings with graphite, ink, and charcoal, I would also make a few more spontaneous ones, or charcoals drawings starting straight away from smaller drawings of elements that caught my eye around the same period. (The 'pyramid' for example is simply based on a similar doodle in one of my notebooks at the time.) Evolving this way allows me to discard elements that are not fitting any longer (but sometimes reappear in later phases) while singling out these montage drawings on their content level. I wasn't particularly satisfied with the rough looks of the sketchy charcoal approach of most drawings. At the same time, this hasty look made me realize how much charcoal keeps on being a preparatory material. Of course, it has been a major medium in prehistoric and even ancient art, and since the growing autonomy of drawing arts in the last century, charcoal drawings stand along subtle oil paintings or intricate textile works. But for a long period, especially throughout modern art history, charcoal was mainly used for sketching and preparing a painting, a sculpture, a building, a rosette, or a tapestry. Using charcoal here to combine scraps into one 'design', like an early modern artist would sketch pieces of reality (bodies, objects, or shades) to prepare a composition, led me to continue this process stepwise toward possible paintings.

            Some of the visual motifs in these drawings are reminiscent of childhood memories, e.g., the kite, the priest, the sea, the (toy) crocodile, the spider, or the cartoony clouds. These motifs are linked to visual memories (an existing thing seen, like the sea, and/or a perceived representation, e.g., the dots on the pieces of a 'domino' game) and/or verbal components: the French expression 'se tenir à carreaux' (to keep quiet or to stand aside), for example, ends up being a strongly recurrent, almost wordless and condense diamond shape or lozenge ('carreau' also means tile, window, stained glass...). The presence of motifs that are linked to my personal 'early history' has to do with an intensification within my long-held psychoanalysis and a recent focus on my children’s drawings within a small publication project for the COMICS research group at the Ghent University. Following La Spirale, I made some sort of graphic compendium of signs and motifs within my drawings, strips, cartoons etcetera from my early infancy until now (unpublished). I had already tested this graphic-archeological process on half of The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé, leading to the publication of Tintin en Radiographie. Graphically working through on encountered elements from found images and reappearing motifs from my own past allows me to rework and discard, and to purify. At this point, the artistic process is concordant with the analytical process, partly content-wise and regarding creative 'procedures', i.e.: remind, rework, treat, discard, condense, simplify. (The parallelisms between artistic or scientific sublimation and the psychoanalytical process have been attested as early as Freud's text on Leonardo Da Vinci, at least.)

Seven Sins III:  pastel drawings and oil paintings

Academic research & education