Drawings by Writers

For certain writers, writing went far beyond the letters themselves, enabling them to better explore the territory of representation: these writers pasted, doodled, drew and painted. This is the particular perspective of the exhibition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC): such an atypical point of view is enriched for its presentation in Lisbon by the presence of two Portuguese artists who admirably illustrated this desire not to respect the blurred frontier between writing and drawing, José de Almada Negreiros and Ana Hatherly. What all the exhibited works say is precisely this: that there is a crossover between languages and forms:

‘We wanted to bring together some quite curious works, running counter to the trends in the market and showing evidence of an artistic activity that is frequently experimental and hard to classify. This is a floating, in-between space, poorly charted and situated in autonomous and rarely frequented territories, which have therefore been little studied and are looked down on by specialists from the fields of art and literature. It might be that, reading between the lines, this is how we become aware of the indispensable nature of this laboratory-zone, which has always existed. It is there that, in total freedom, in other words without the constraints of professionality and profitability, a thought is prepared, simultaneously pictorial and scriptorial, rarely obeying the criteria of the dominant aesthetics.’

Jean-Jacques Lebel
[excerpt from the text «The one in the other», published in the exhibition catalogue L’un pour l’autre, les écrivains dessinent, Brechet-Chastel / IMEC, Paris, 2008]