Tardigrades Drawing Selection, 1995

A selection of drawing studies on paper – various sizes

This selection of drawings from the mid-1990s documents a raw, instinct-driven mode of expression in which the human body is no longer a representational object but a vessel for instinct, trauma, and archetypal memory. The figures exhibit a visual language rooted in a pre-cultural state of being: absence of background, distorted proportions, mask-like facial features, and gender ambiguity – all referencing a condition prior to the imprint of civilization.

The employed techniques – fine graphite lines intersected by coarse, gestural marks of red chalk, or in other cases, layered combinations of wax-resist scratching, ink, and graphite – function not merely as formal strategies, but as metaphors for the body’s memory. Scraped surfaces, incised contours, pigment and line become conduits of somatic intensity, evoking a corporeal experience beneath the skin. Frottage-like textures, deliberately eroded forms, and exaggerated, overwrought gestures speak the visual language of suppressed memory and the instinct for survival.

There is no narrative, no spatial illusion – only bodies, or rather body fragments, suspended in a state of raw existence. These forms do not depict, they are. They do not represent, they expose. Neither fully human nor animal, they occupy a liminal state of being at the threshold where culture has yet to tame matter.

The grotesque expressivity of the style emerges at the intersection of unfiltered honesty and the visual logic of the unconscious. Formally distorted and condensed into archaic, almost totemic corporeality, these images align with a visual unconscious that precedes contemporary discourses on body politics, offering instead a psychic map of the inner terrain of the maker. Within this world, brutality coexists with vulnerability, instinct with contemplation, and primal urges with a mythical sense of origin.

This body of work reflects not only a particular aesthetic stance of its era but also a radical artistic position that treats the body as a medial surface – one that carries not identity, but the pre-verbal, ancestral strata of human existence. Its suggestive power lies in the unrestrained gesture, the condensed formal language, and the transpersonal depth of bodily experience.