In this text, art critic Paulo Herkenhoff identifies and describes some of the characteristics of drawing as an autonomous form of expression in contemporary art from South America. He formulates ten categories in relation to the production in the medium of drawing by the artists discussed: cartography, the indescribable, ruined machines, quotations, drawing with “the other,” precarious and fleeting constructions, graphic blows, verbal projections, excess, and perverse virtues. These notions are based on a broad understanding of drawing as a “medium to navigate over time,” a means of “wounding a body,” and even a political “attack or act of resistance.” Drawing can also be a “solitary manifestation” of phenomenological actions or an instrument with which to explore other areas of knowledge. In sum, drawing entails graphic signs based on an entire “ethos.” The artists Herkenhoff discusses include Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay); Gego and Miguel Von Dangel (Venezuela); Juan Downey (Chile); León Ferrari, Marie Orensanz and Liliana Porter (Argentina); and Mira Schendel, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, and Waltércio Caldas (Brazil).

Paulo Herkenhoff (b. 1949) is an internationally known art critic and curator. He was the curator of the XXIV São Paulo Biennial held in 1998. His career began in 1975 at the Project Room of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio), a venue central to the avant-garde art scene of that city insofar as, for a brief period (1975 to 1978), it housed projects that interrogated and explored a range of artistic languages.

This text by Paulo Herkenhoff was published in the catalogue to the show Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing, held in 1997 at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery of The University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition, which was curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Edith Gibson, featured works by major South American draftsmen produced from the seventies onward. The following artists were among those included in the show: Luis [Fernando] Benedit, Waltércio Caldas, Santiago Cárdenas, Juan Downey, Liliana Porter, Cildo Meireles, Gego, Marie Orensanz, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, José Gamarra, Antonio Dias, Carmela Gross, Artur Barrio, Luis Felipe Noé, and Miguel Angel Ríos. Like the exhibition, Herkenhoff’s essay is based on a broad understanding of what constitutes drawing, a conception informed by the denial of pat divisions between traditional artistic categories or genres (such as painting, sculpture, printmaking) in contemporary art. Therefore, both the text and the exhibition heed the experience of art, above all in South America, in the second half of the twentieth century, a period when drawing emerged as an autonomous and “transitory” form of expression with only vague limits in relation to other artistic languages.

In a text written in conjunction with Anna Bella Geiger and Ivens Machado entitled “Sala Experimental” [doc. no. 1110602], Paulo Herkenhoff asserts that the Project Room played a major role in the art scene of the seventies. In those years, Herkenhoff—who was an artist, rather than a critic at that time—was connected to the draftsmen he discusses in this essay for Re-Aligning Vision.