Installation #1

2014 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines. The artist uses abstract architectural elements that he reproduces on the wall in which he inserts drawings, elements from photographs and drawings of texts collected from art magazines. The repetition, control and imperfection of the movements create a tension, a particular vibration in his geometrical drawings and in the drawings of texts. The idea of repetition, of a copy, appears as an essential ritual element and a ritual in the artist’s work process. Despite a kind of austerity and the evocation of a minimal and conceptual aesthetic, a light goes through his composition giving his work an organic dimension. Exhibition walls, random perspectives and frontal hangings provoke a sort of dizziness and of virtual upheaval. This work is composed of two wall drawings and three drawings on paper (a protocol allows the installation in different spaces). The artist’s idea is to merge different spaces together, to affirm their existence while denying it (confronting tangible and virtual space). The drawings hung in these spaces reproduces the traces of previous works, in memory of previous projects and past actions. The drawing made out of texts is a patchwork of fragments of sentences coming from Asian magazines. These fragments evoke a different place where the snippets of words complete and contradict each other, and seem to describe, explain as well as disappear. The architectural skeleton, its absence of density, suspends the time of physical experience. Wavering and steadiness are put to test in a strangely experienced period of time.

1968, Helmond, the Netherlands