Seven Sins V : ink reductions and co. (2023)

More at ease now with this process of (literal and figural) reduction and reinterpretation, I repeated the process to A4 ink drawings. I copy-reduced the previous seven A3 ink drawings and used these new photocopies on the lightbox to make A4 ink drawings. The results and conclusions were like the ones in the previous step: reducing and reworking lead to obvious simplification, discarding, enforcing, condensing and precising. Moreover, the topics are known 'through and through', their 'essence' is at stake, no longer their exploration and their construction. Keeping the comfortable A4 paper format I nonetheless repeated the process four more times, reducing the image size to A5 and then A6, A7 and A8. The results are rather self-explanatory: while reducing the seven scenes to image size A5 and A6, I had to make the drawings sharper, almost scriptural. The drawings with image size A7 have a sharp cartoony quality to them, while the final series with image size A8 (kept tightly in the upper right corner of the A4 paper) tend toward some kind of 'stylish' stamp or ex-libris drawing. (These last series, made with brush and ink, show former graffiti, like the hergean zigzag, typical when I drew comics and cartoons such as Parkinson and Alzheimer, for example.)
Reducing to the extreme my Seven Sins - continuing to A9 and further did not seem relevant to me - also produced quite some 'collateral damage', i.e., marginal material like 'blot papers' or newly found imagetexts, which I included into the process. These rests often reveal many traces: they bear the obvious marks of the physical working process but are also the side effects of the expanding and reduction process of the seven scenes. Therefore, I felt like repeating and reassess the tested techniques of combining, expanding, simplifying (and if needed, reducing) found elements into new singular images. Evolving from scraps of printed matter (and other encountered material) to graphite and charcoal drawings in the first place, but now refining the graphical treatment, seems an interesting inquiry path to me. From the trial and error of the Seven Sins series, I can intuitively and more explicitly deduce several do's and don'ts in the elaboration of possibly more satisfying images. One of the aspects to be reduced or even avoided is the narrative and/or information load clearly present in the first steps of the Seven Sins series, often concurring with too intensified or baroque use of style, technique, and 'matter' (topic, motifs, and materiality). Of course, this is a matter of taste. At the same time, the 'emptying' of the autonomous image is almost a modern and postmodern cliché, heavily under attack by identity politics - left and right. I aim for the kind of image that flees the all too narrative or the intentional/representational overload (leading to kitsch or marshiness), but also avoiding the facility of much of the now long-lasting chique of 'not showing', showing the void, the emptiness, the surface etc.

            Critical stances and personal preferences set aside, this is a question of necessary evolution of my artistic activity, including my specific relation to comics and graphic novels in the first place, but also with visual arts, music, cinema, and literature, as it is the case for most contemporary creatives. What is more specific here and comes to the fore with the Seven Sins experience is that, on the one hand, I experience my limited skills and artistic implication (for different reasons), and on the other, I start to perceive the importance of the trace on the level of developing visual work: the actual and virtual marks an image bears from its preparatory sketches or previous instances, but also the renderings of an acting body, an implied psyche, a personal history, the history of materials, uses, techniques, art history and history at large and so on. Drawings, paintings, and other pictures are always more or less complex traces before they act as 'works of art' (artefacts) or start to signify. This 'before' can be understood temporally and, mostly, virtually: even when I inattentively draw a random line, this simple line is potentially 'rich' by what it bears: the history of the material it speaks of the cultural context in which it might end up, the subjective unconscious it might reveal etcetera. I will disclose many aspects of the trace in an artistic publication to come. For now, these exploration through and of the Seven Series, and the material in its wake, allowed me to make some temporary conclusion on a more practical level as well. Evaluating these series and commenting upon their findings and failures made me get 'to the bottom of it' - het onderste uit de kan halen - even more already than during my PhD research and consequent dissertation. This being said, I also honestly hope to reduce this process to a more detached and 'superficial' take on my creativity and its subjective and societal embedment.

Sébastien Conard,
March 2023

Seven Sins

Academic research & education