Vor den Linien

Marion Piffer Damiani

Paul Thuile is a draughtsman. He draws on paper, on boards, on walls. His subjects he derives from what surrounds him day to day, mostly from sections of rooms or everyday objects. The figurative drawings reduce the depiction of the world around him to its mere outlines. It is the tentative gaze that guides the pen. The records of this process are almost seismographic, the lines a little shaky. They stutter, crawl, and momentarily stop, before moving on. Moreover, the gaze brings its own centrifugal force into play. As the artist draws his objects as he sees them from a certain point of view, the perspectives appear slightly distorted. And so every view is unique, as the dynamic of the gesture and the circumstances of the observation are different every time. Which is exactly what makes for the fascination of the line. While it unfolds its mimetic potential, it simultaneously proves to be an arbitrary trace, a marking that refers back to its own origin, to the drawing gesture, and ultimately to the draughtsman himself. It is this very game of deception that Thuile has made the subject of his latest group of works. He enlarges sections of some of his own drawings, focuses on individual tiny details, until the objects disappear. In this way the anatomy of the line becomes the picture subject. What thus emerges are the flow lines, the meanders and frayings, the breaks in this exploration of the world (by way of drawing). The artist picks up his own scent, outlines his own traces, visualises them as negative silhouettes. Every single panel maps one tiny segment of a draughtsman's stream of consciousness, of an artful dialogue with the drawing released from any restrictive subject.

The artist Paul Thuile (b. 1959) lives and works in Gargazon (South Tyrol) and teaches free drawing at the Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano