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Laying stress on the tidiness of drawing is just as philistine and unworthy as to judge a poet's draft by the beauty of his handwriting. — Ernst Gombrich.
… in a picture when a line no longer describes a thing but functions as a thing itself, its inner power is fully released. — Wassily Kandinsky.
Despite the candid bombast about drawing in recent catalogue essays and books devoted to the subject, it wasn’t long ago that disegno (that favorite discipline of Giorgio Vassari) was considered a minor art craft. Theorists –perhaps inadvertently— classified it as a province of painting and sculpture, an annex of thought-sketches and preliminary under-drawings for the sake of a more general schema of making. In architecture and engineering, even with the advent of CAD, the craft remains object dependent.
Drawing has acquired some prestige but is not yet considered an independent discipline. There are issues of subjectivity and size. As presentative, drawing is smaller in format, more intimate, fragile, sensitive to light, and delicate (looking at drawings requires a closer approach to the paper surface, which obliges a less hassle-free viewing behavior).
Given this precedent, we should welcome “Transference,” an exhibit by Ralph Provisero, curated by William Cordova, entirely devoted to the art of drawing. You probably know of Provisero’s massive abstract/geometric sculptures, employing heavy-duty industrial materials. But this other side of the artist was kept in secret until now. Cordova considers the body of work collected for “Transference” of great potential to fully understand Povisero’s art.
Cordova connects the dots in a telephone conversation: “With this show, his art comes full circle. Some of these drawings have been kept private for 30 years.” The curator considers that most of Provisero’s work has been about obsessive restraint. “Ralph transferred that compulsive need to draw bold lines into bold and cold steel sculptures. Now we can see a less controlled, more prose-inclined than the verse-inclined side of Ralph,” Cordova concludes.
Ralph Provisero, Liar, 2020
This short essay is coming out simultaneously with the final selection for “Transference,” which comprises a fraction of Provisero’s dozens upon dozens of drawings. My job is to connect the parts to the whole. So, if I remain faithful to the whole, no part of it (“Transference”being the first exemplar put up for exhibition) would suffer.
One may wonder, why “transference?” I offer three points:
1. Think of the disorder of an artist’s daily life transferred into the methodical care for detail within creativity. There are two levels here: the frantic amalgamation of calligraphy, reminders, doodling and tagging, rendered as careful sketches of actual and imagined objects, and the next level of experimentation: the rotating, scaling, and shearing of volumes (depictions that remind one of vertebrate forelimb-evolution comparison charts at a Natural Science Museum). These creative techniques and methods render Provisero’s intimate pictorial cosmos a mixed bag of collages of lettering, comic strip nuggets, ideological truncations, mechanical concoctions, isomorphic gizmos –all provisionally resolved into an unsettled aesthetic whole.
2. The back-and-forth of drawing conventions between our contemporary art “impasse” and Twentieth-Century moderns. One may colligate Provisero’s works as being informed (consciously or not it doesn’t matter) by a host of 1970s phantoms. Think of Yayoi Kusama’s delicate “oval” accumulations, Bruce Conner’s fluid wood-grain drawings, Donald Judd’s delicate geometries, Philip Guston’s whimsical pop sketches, Nancy Grossman’s worked-and-reworked collages, even scattered bits of Robert Morris’ cryptic scribblings.
3. One last point is how the 2D realm of drawing finds its way into the 3D realm of sculpture, and vice-versa. Provisero works as a sculptor, a profession still recognized within division of labor boundaries. Many of these studies, such as Hybrid Composition, Story, Floating Installation, Thumbnail Studies, Earthwork Studies (from 2007), explore what Provisero calls “hybridized elements,” employing compressed vessels, wedges & other tetrahedra and the more mechanical Plumb bobs, bell scopes, etc.
Take a favorite Provisero form, the thumbnail, which appears in several sketches. The form is rendered first as sculptural and then as architectural, as in Studio with Chair (2008), a Johnsonian Glass House-like structure. There are drawings of concrete pieces from demolition projects, like Study for Re-Bonded (2007), which later become juxtaposed into more organized exemplars. These studies may eventually find their “flesh” in shows, public work commissions, private collections, museums, etc.
I’d tentatively propose four main themes for this collection: faces, lettering, objects, and 2D assemblages.
1. Faces are a good place to start. Not all faces are the same, not even the many copies of Provisero’s own. Check out the pissed-off What (2014), the Zen-looking Moodude (2019) and the stoical Character (2020), concise self-portraits and prototypes for subsequent duplications. The visage is repeated in Bell Size (2020). Next to an unfussy drawing of a bell, an onomatopoeia, “Ding Dong,” is thrown against a pitch-dark background with blocky squared-font interjections colored in red and blue. They shout: “Scare Help,” “Oh, No, No.” Provisero’s Pop-infused face shows up, shy, anxious, self-deprecating.
Imposter (2019) shows the artist’s alter ego watching –in disbelief— at his own wreck. “WHAT!” –he helplessly blurts out. In Flayva:Red Down (2019), a palindrome of cryptic pictograms and messaging, we spot several Proviseros: one goggling at us, the other wearing thick 1960s glasses while rebuking: “Ready to run like rats!?”
The ultimate doubling happens in Heads (2020), with dozens of Proviseros, staring at you. Upon close scrutiny, I felt like Craig, the puppeteer in the film Being John Malkovich (played by John Cusack), walking through a non-Euclidean portal, entering Provisero’s head.
2. The lettering series stands as Provisero’s Profanum. A hybrid between typeface and graffiti, part jargon, part folksy etymology, the series reveals a self-centeredness turned against itself.
Take Rat Trap (2020). It shows a hamster running on a wheel, next to a hand-lettered parable: “A hamster that can’t escape its wheel will eventually collapse.” Check out Who Cares? (2019), a display of squarey fonts, or What Else Is New (2019), disclosing quaint platitudes: “So tired,” “Need to rest.”
Gradually, the series undergoes several incantations, as in the knotty Purple Paisley Purge (2020), a 3D manifold titivated smartly with a cliché: “If You Don’t Stand for Something You’ll Fall for Anything” –a message of absorption & rejection of self.
Societal Distance Anxiety (2020) pitches hard-lettered memes: “Just Let Go,” “Now we can switch sides.” Mirror, Mirror (2019) is peppered with kind of 4chan threading lemmas: “Alternate Universe,” “Mother F…,” “Quantum Quagmire.”
Indeed, the many future catastrophes –always deferred during concocted Apocalypses— are a subject that Provisero addresses adroitly (while appearing clueless). I relish the tone of these titles: The Knife Poet Jack Ass Will Cut You (2019), which can take you anywhere. The imaginative United and Resonant (2020) presents a set of memetic instructions for survival at the end of the world: “Trying to deny yourself will take you no place,” next to: “Health security: pretext, exercise.”
One cryptic drawing executed in blue ink is Mirror, Mirror (2019). It displays an isomorphic e-Boy-like structure with the letters “RG.” Out of curiosity, I googled the acronym and got 2,500,000 results, with these choices at the top: “Radio Guide,” “Radio Government,” “Remote Gateway,” “Router Guide,” etc. Granted, none of this is necessary to understand Provisero’s arcanum. It’s just a mental trap he preempts for himself, his doubles (and gossipy critics who dare to find out).
The lettering series exhibit a graphic design urge, as if between mark-making and performance. With these drawings, one feels a sense of hurry and secrecy akin to the art of Graffiti. It’s all about the mark and the index, as in: “I [Provisero] was here.”
3. Objects are part and parcel of a sculptor’s trade. Provisero is obsessed with the Plumb bob, the vessel, the buoy, the ramp. Then, methodically, he proceeds to transform every part of them. There’s the earth ramp, which the sculptor exhibited at the James Royal Palm Hotel in 2012.
In different drawings the ramp appears as “Earth Studies.” The form is constantly expanded and permutated: as two ramps joined at their bases, scattered upside down on a dump site, sketched as rammed “earth structures,” or displayed as truncated pyramids.
In ten drawings for Organic Study, a 2020 series, the vessel grows a sort of pipe elbow-appendix, which rotates sideways, entering the bowl’s body. The process reminds one of a Klein-bottle (a topological surface bending back upon itself) whose overall volume shifts into smaller receptacles connected now by longer conduits.
Several sketches show weird anthropomorphic permutations. These studies of solids-in-revolution (as it’s called in geometry) are not a brainy digression. This is what the art of sculpture is about. If drawing is a 2D endeavor, a good part of sculpture could be argued to be the art of solids in revolution.
A better simile: just imagine how to draw a line from any point to any other point, or to describe a circle with any center and radius (sort of how Euclid becomes Lobachevsky). Some of Provisero’s organic ramps reminds one of Vincenzo Lancia’s concept drawings, which predated the Lancia Lambda of 1923. Predictably, many of these “discoveries” appear in Provisero’s recent, softer sculptures.
In fact, it has happened before. Consider Duchamp’s anamorphic projections, which highlighted the role of the observer to question sculpture in Large Glass (an apparatus locking all the directions together). I bring Duchamp after having seen Provisero’s Study for Charged Glass (2008).
4. The 2D-assemblages are part pictogram, part daily chore, part diary, comprising disparate adages, phrasemes, interjections, etc. The studies may contain a to-do-list, with items either crossed out (sideways), or lettering (top, down). In tandem, Provisero adds calligraphic spurts with interjections and propositions. These transferences evince a patient labor of drawing-in-stages, that is, coming back to what was left to add new layers of meaning. In the end, the lettering and the drawing allure each other in unremitting tension.
Ralph Provisero, FUMF, 2019
The overall design happens –as it were— from inside of the whole, emerging, for instance, as dialogue balloons within a comic strip (with clear two-line contours), separating the various elements and woven patterns of crosshatching and crisscrossing, carefully executed in fine point pen. Look at Lean into Darkness (2021), and Purge Page (2020) with explicit doodling-technique solutions.
Ralph Provisero, Busy Body Closed Chaos, 2019An example is Busybody Closed Chaos (2019), a sort of Proviseroian time-machine room-apparatus. Two Proviseros peek into an imperative upper caption: “Hold them,” next to a black sun burst. As the time-machine (with tinted windows) bends inwards into non-Euclidean territory, three passages, one stuck above the other, render a peremptory sequence: “Busybody doodlingwithnofocus,” “collections,” “memories,” all coming to a screeching halt into the word “CLOSED.” The dictum: “What a mess,” appears in the drawing’s lower’s left corner.
There are elaborate pictograms of superimposed elements: some scratched over and rendered illegible, some written over on purpose (a performative, pictoric surplus). These quasi-cohesive dispatches trigger a tricky counterpoint between the whole and the part, as if we witnessed a splicing of the artist’s self, an inner rhythm beyond the thought process (for the sake of the assemblage itself). How so? The seemingly disconnected parts increase tensions, shaping how the whole is assessed by –what else! — any re-encoding in memory of the overall ambiguity in the drawing, a bona fide self-judgment supervening Provisero’s unintended –nonetheless enthusing— inner chaos.
Critic and historian Ernst van Alphen reveal that Albrecht Dürer believed some artists to possess a quasi-magical ability, which he called Gwalt, that manifests itself, particularly in the art of drawing. Gwalt is a unique gift, a stamp of a person’s ingenium, unique and irreducible.
Ralph Provisero harnesses that ability and we’re fortunate to see the results.
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