Axel Stockburger, 2022
“Ex nihilo nihil fit”
Karine Fauchard’s presentation at Punta gallery represents nothing less than a paradigmatic shift in her intense artistic engagement with the possibilities of drawing. While she has explored a highly idiosyncratic form of subtle graphite drawings in recent years, carefully managing the amount of visual information on the picture plane, allowing her drawings to breathe, she has developed distinctively novel conceptual proposition. “In the beginning was everything” is a negotiation with the tradition of the white cube, which is precisely not regarded as a “neutral” stage, serving as a contrast for different artworks, but is usurped in its entirety and turned into the picture plane. Graphite is applied to the walls of the gallery and it literally fills the space with “everything”. Graphic structures are then generated by erasing elements on these walls, literally turning the practice of drawing on it’s head. Form emerges from erasure and the visual elements that appear in such a manner are the results of the reduction, rather than the addition of material. One is reminded of the earliest forms of visual artistic production, the iconic shapes of human hands in ancient cave paintings, which are following a similar process of negativity: Color that has been applied on a hand, which was subsequently removed, leaving a silhouette, a trace that points towards the ongoing continuity of human efforts to negotiate contingency. In Fauchard’s art, this strategy of removing information with an eraser in order to generate forms also allows for complex ranges of graduated contrasts, not unlike chiaroscuro, which lend the visual elements an intense spatial presence. A gestural process of excavation, that is also related to the very specific local material qualities of the walls themselves, where more or less graphite remains attached to specific parts, makes small irregularities visible and the artist carefully considers these specific circumstances. Under the conditions of contemporary digital culture, where we are increasingly incapable of perceiving the enormous amounts of information offered to us, an approach guided by reduction and erasure appears increasingly viable. May the white cube be filled with everything that came before and that happens now, there still remains a space for artistic necessity, for individual gestures of asserting life. This methodology certainly rhymes with the ontological doctrine of Parmenides, who posited that in the universe nothing ever comes from nothing, that there fundamentally could be no “creatio ex nihilo”.