About the project
CZEN
Artlist — Center for Contemporary Arts Prague

As I Added Before

Author
Jan Nálevka
Year
2012
Technique and size

drawing by blue pen on A4 office paper, 500 sheets

About work

All of the sheets in the pack of office paper have been manually lined so that the result is as little distinguishable from standard printed squared paper as possible. Subsequently, all of the squares in the grid have been crossed out diagonally by another square grid. The squared paper can still be perceived as empty, as the squares are a mere utilitarian structure determining the way of their possible further filling. However, by covering them by another square grid in the angle of 45°, the empty space of each of the squares has been factually crossed out, and thus the utilitarian value of the original grid, which cannot be filled in anymore, has been destroyed. Only now is the paper really empty. The exact order has been disturbed by the human factor; although all of the drawings are identical, each of them represents an original due to its little imperfections. The blue pen, the most ordinary office tool, has become the drawing material. The drawings have been installed in space so that the square structure of each of them continues that of the others. In this way, they have become a single spatiotemporal drawing taking up the space of the gallery; an open geometric structure which can theoretically continue ad infinitum.

Photo

Photo author: Ondřej Polák
Center for Contemporary Arts Prague www.fcca.cz 2006–2024
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