Drawn from the psyche

Drawing is the most fundamental and seminal of actions within the art world. It is a foundational skill. A core subject in academies and schools of art, drawing is the first act of giving form to concepts, ideas, words and feelings. The first step towards the production of the visual always begins with the drawn line, delineating form and shape from the uniform blankness of the surface space.

But drawing, it seems, is often relegated to a lesser endeavour, habitually underrated as a means of producing art. As evidence of inception and as a preliminary sketch of both product and process, it runs the danger of being considered as separate or subservient to the finished work or executed concept. Yet drawing constitutes a central act of framing: it constructs the skeletal core of emergent objects and encounters, and acts as the hub from which all nodes eventually originate. The act of drawing in itself extends way beyond documentation of visible, perceivable reality; the process of tracing and letting lines form temporarily opens up a contemplative space, a zone where fixed states may be revisited, reversed and created anew.

Kawayan de Guia’s latest one-man exhibition at MO_Space returns to drawing as a material and source for art-making. The exhibition combines found drawings as well as an assortment of objects in several wall mounted panels. The accumulated images span nearly the artist’s entire lifetime: ranging from drawings done during his childhood years to very recent works. Lists and signs share space with sketches and scribbled notes, collected during the most unexpected of moments or unlikeliest of circumstances in between.

Through these mixed media panels, de Guia revisits the act of drawing as among the earliest processes that he has learned to do as an artist—starting from albums of his earliest scribbles to his formative years at the Philippine High School for the Arts. “My mentor required us to draw our hands for a whole year. He said if you mastered drawing your hand, you could draw anything,” de Guia recalls, for instance.

The exhibition collates these discrete chronicles of the artist’s life. Surrounded by frames and grids fashioned from wood and meter sticks, the individual images are presented as connected yet individually separate works. The ruled lines of the sticks are consistent and measured, assigning quasi-numerical values to the hundreds of memories that these panels contain. At the same time, the logic of these catalogued recollections exhibits a sense of non-linearity: arranged not in chronological sequence but as random, psychological composites. Combined, they form multiple recollections, originating and operating largely within the realm of the subconscious.

De Guia’s found drawings, occupying the gallery walls, thus present their share of small surprises and strange juxtapositions: random scenes and anecdotal vignettes are arranged adjacent to archival documents, humorous illustrations share space with narratives of contradiction and loss. As documents drawn from the psyche, the collated works beckon the viewer to seek out more nodes connecting personal and social histories.

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