Dear Margin

Drawings, graphisms, and messages. The drawn text, the overflowing text.

I toss around how best to put it, aiming to accompany. To accompany a friend on their adventure, the artist in their risk, the author on their journey into the world behind both the curtain and the looking glass.

Drawing here is a practice brimming with impulses and sequences, secrets and gestures, each of them eager to be manifested.

A door opens and a drawing appears, a drawing that can no longer be torn from the gesture, from the act of drawing. Now, given over to the precise articulation of thought and feeling, adverse to any delay.

At play is a great deal of passion, and the desire to show and show oneself blossoms, shameless, in the alwaysmuddled first bud.

We catch a glimpse of memories and intuitions. Layered and contradictory, they couple and forever expand in these instances of a discourse cloaked in vast vitality.

Pulse of the precarious nature of feelings?

Drawings that parody illustration, drawings that trace forms and textures. Drawings that venture gestures that explore their possibilities, drawings that nestle and thicken.

Drawings that recall and appeal to texts read and reread, beloved authors, unforgettable readings. Authors that, whether tragic or joyous, always move us.

But these are tatters of phrases and thoughts, words cut up, turned by the alchemy of drawing into another way to voice images.

A locked-in coexistence, texts that take the shape of figures, images that cherish those texts on a single chain of hermetic meanings, in the common journey to depths that become surface, that refer us back to stories made music, to universes, to megalopoles peopled with ghosts and reverie, with wakefulness and slumber.

Rest from so much acquired knowledge. Memory that releases a stream of consciousness that becomes humanized by assessing its own folly.

All of this is somehow like looking out the window of a high-speed train. Everything there is real, but it slips away. It ensues the way acts of understanding ensue: when, finally clear, they come to a close, the object has shifted.

Disconcertion makes way not only for anguish, but also for curiosity. The author, it could be said, confronts that anguish, but is not carried away by curiosity. The world gets away from him, but the images and words hold tight to the drawing.

Any text is an unending and unfinished weave, time reconstructed, time unfathomable but present. There is no beginning or end. Each image is also a re- beginning, an organizing and passing principle. But also a vertex nowhere at all.

The passion to make, idyll with testament, eagerness to be and remain present. The pleasure of glimpsing an identity in the middle of the whirlwind. The place of the keeper, the author of the code, the one awaiting knowledge.

Colors—this is where drawing is anchored in painting and, hence, common distinctions are erased. There is no doubt that what is drawn in color, what fills the surface with color, heats up the images, intensifies the vertigo. Drawing ceases to be the incision of the tip of the pencil that had explored mimesis.

When Lucas unfolds his delicate molding papers—he literally unfolds them (they come folded over)—he opens up an unpredictable box, breaks a magic seal; he lets out a colorful universe of endless episodes kept between gentle creases scattered at moments of loneliness driven by the narrative impulse.

It is frightening to speak of drawing’s magic. So we promise not to say anything, and we keep silent, knowing full well that it exists.

And that it is with us here.

Tulio de Sagastizábal, August 2019.