ARTICLE / WORKING DRAWING

by Laura Hoptman

Drawing plays an important role in the oeuvre of Los Carpinteros and it is deployed by them with astonishing variety. Once used exclusively to describe black and white line work, the term drawing has come to include a range of media including a range of media including watercolor, gouache, and crayon as well as the very act of mark-making, whether it be accomplished by an activity like walking, or even a mechanical function like an automatic lever or a user-propelled mouse or joystick. Drawing can also be divided in terms of what one could call its “purposeful context.” A drawing can be preparatory for something else or meant to stand alone as a finished work. It can be an expression of a gesture, and illustration of an idea or a detailed observation of an object in nature, bound, perhaps, by certain conventions of three-dimensional imaging, as in architectural drafting. A drawing can be a record, or the “material registration of a conceptual process: paradoxically making material even the most dematerialized artistic endeavors.

Although it has been said that drawing is “an open, interminable activity, ultimately unqualifiable in aesthetic terms,” each kind of drawing carries with it a specific history; although drawing itself seems to have always been around, the way that drawing has been deployed by artists and received by viewers has varied with the vicissitudes of time and taste. Depending upon the period, drawing can be “germinal,” “parasitic,” autonomous, or variations upon all three. After almost thirty years of the dominance of process-oriented drawing as a kind of marker of the progressive and the modern, the drawing as a kind of marker of the progressive and the modern, the past ten years have seen a resurgence in the work of younger artists of more illustrative, narrative, finished drawings, what the French in the time of Watteau called “les dessins les plus acheves.”

Los Carpintero’s drawings can be divided in to three basic types all of which more or less fall in to the category of “dessins plus acheves.” The first type often depicts objects arranged in some form of imagined space. Compositions unto themselves, they might allude to motifs later used in sculptural works, but as compositions they are closer to narratives than to representations of objects, or groups of objects arranged as possible installations. The second type can be called “working drawings,” for sculptures, although many motifs are clearly more visionary than buildable. Still, these drawings depict objects often drafted to scale with indications of the most specific details of construction including colors and materials. The third type are wall drawings. In the past these drawings have resembled large scale two-dimensional backdrops or floor plans in which three-dimensional elements are placed.

Recent examples of the first type include a series of gouaches in which groups of objects float in the atmosphere. Mundo de faros transparentes (World of Transparent Lighthouses) is a sheet crowded with hovering lighthouses, rendered in transparent wash that makes Los Carpinteros have rendered in sculptural form as well, but those in the drawing are the opposite of solidity, and for that matter, the inverse of the stolid “thereness” that the notion of the lighthouse represents. Attached to nothing, certainly not to ground, these ghostlike objects float like balloons, their function as directionals inverted; rather than leading us somewhere, these lighthouses are meant to lead us away. Luces de 100w (100 watt lights) is another tour de force manipulation of gouache that in this case depicts a flock of electric light bulbs, not floating but flying. Less an accumulation than a rain, or better yet, an infestation, light bulbs like locusts swarm the field of vision; detached from power sources they are nonetheless alive with an energy that may be fairly described (with a wink) as electric. Bulbs clear and clouded one on top of another, and even three piled in space, describe transparency with an almost photo – realistic precision, but the addition of a telltale drip informs us that virtuosity is not the ultimate point of the exercise. A comparison of the liquidity of light, water, and air, is. Agua (water), drawing that can be considered the third in the triad, features clear plastic water jugs of the kind that fit inverted into a water cooler. Ranged like the lighthouses, aloft like dirigibles, they exude a bluish glow that is the essence of the elision of light, air and water.

These three drawings transform objects by multiplying them, and then removing them from their functional context. The striped traffic cones of Conos rojos (red cones) sit on a ground, but this attempt at realism is interrupted with drips of red gouache. Unlike the drips found on luces de 100w that disturb the drawing’s precision rendering, these drips, falling off the dagger-like forms of the cones, further an allusion – that is, of the cones to knives and to bloody violence. While this drawing clearly cannot be interpreted as specifically preparatory for a sculptural installation, because a kind of real space has been delineated, it straddles a line between pure idea works and those that propose a three-dimensional project that could be realized. Jugando con el limite (Playing with the Limit) is an example of the latter. It also features red striped traffic cones but in concert with several sizes of police barricades, all of which are arranged as a kind of absurd obstacle course in which each cone or barricade blocks access to another. Carefully arranged and embedded on the page exactly where it should be in space – comfortably occupying foreground, middle ground and background – the composition reads as a rendering of sculpture perfectly reproducible in the real, three – dimensional world.

There is a peculiarity evident in a number of Los Carpinteros’ working drawings that sets them apart, however subtly, from more conventional drawings for executable sculptures. With its great detail, pinpoint scale, and accurate draftsmanship, a drawing like Jugando con el limite seems distinctly like a view of an object that already exists, albeit on paper. The sculpture is not in process, it is already made and has been observed in full; in fact one might argue, the drawing obviates the necessity of realizing the sculptural installation altogether. A similar effect is evident in the startling Piscina (Proyecto de arte publico) [ Pool (Public Art Project)]. A gouache rendering of an in-ground swimming pool in the shape of a submachine gun. Other artists, notably Teresita Fernandez (a Miami-born sculptor of Cuban extraction), have used the deliciously cool lines of a filled swimming pool to the most elegant of minimalist ends, but Los Carpinteros grab for its symbolism of wealth, power and luxury that comes at a price. A jokey take on the notion of the water pistol, this brightly colored work is almost cartoon-like; yet, Piscina includes scale measurements and even a small sketch of and elevation. One could, these details suggest, execute this work in three dimensions. But one wouldn’t because it isn’t necessary. Everything is there in the drawing.

The metaphorical potential of the swimming pool returns in Piscina llena (Filled Pool) in which the pool is in the shape of a gaping blue maw with a lolling tongue, its lip rimmed by white ladders resembling teeth, and in Piscina-Toalla I (Pool-Towel I) in which the pool is embedded in a beach towel which also forms its surrounding deck. Still another, entitled Cascada (Waterfall), features a metallic washtub bent to an organic shape that looks like a water droplet, with the front end bent at 90 degrees to create the effect of a waterfall should the tub be filled with water. It is notable that the drawing does not depict it in use – the tub is empty. In the drawing itself though, the liquid unevenness of the tub punningly mimics flowing water. It is an effect that works wonderfully well in the drawing – but probably not in three dimensions.

Los Carpinteros have referred to drawings like this as not precisely preparatory, and in fact, this group exists on a loose continuum between theoretically and actually buildable. If the cone, barricade and swimming pool drawings seem to exist most convincingly in two, rather than three dimensions, Los Carpinteros’ series of fountain and furniture projects don not have the almost ineffable quality of the already there. In their emphasis on the structure, and in their scale more fitting for a portable object, and in the manner in which they sit on an otherwise empty page, they resemble more conventional working drawings for sculptures. Examples of this kind of work, some of which date two to three years earlier than the more elaborate, more visionary gouaches, include a series of three drawings entitled Fuego (Fire), Agua (Water) and Aire (Air) , each of which depict a human-shaped fountain fashioned from plumbing pipes from which fire, water, and air spurt as if from uncauterized veins. Later examples include Cama (Bed), a drawing detailing a white sheeted bed and pillows made from metal and coated with enamel to trompe l’oeil effect, and White Room, a kind of installation view of a heap of white cushions made in the same fashion.

The third kind of drawing produced by Los Carpinteros are those that are executed in situ on a wall. Executed in outline, they are the most architectural of all of the artists’ drawings as they resemble elevation sketches. The product of a period in their work that began in the mid nineteen-nineties, the execution of wall drawings has become increasingly rare for the group. By their very nature, the wall drawings are the most detached from the artist’ three-dimensional work. As I have observed elsewhere, the wall drawings occupy a place between Los Carpinteros’ free-standing objects and their works on paper in that they are actually a hybridization of their sculptural projects and their works on paper.

Café, a work first exhibited in 1996, incorporated three-dimensional objects in front of an elaborately delineated backdrop that included a life-sized male figure in outline within a façade line drawn as an elevation, and embellished by three-dimensional items like a pile of bricks, a rope and a wheelbarrow. As they would continue to do in their drawings on paper, Los Carpinteros included proportional measurements for all structural elements of the wall drawing – even the figure. What at first might seem an absurd addition, particularly for an ephemeral drawing for something clearly not meant to be constructed, it is an important connection to both the working drawings and the visionary ones. However distinct, there are clear connections among most all of Los Carpinteros’ drawings and these link them to the group’s wider production of sculptures and sculptural installations. Like their three- dimensional works, the objects depicted in their drawings resemble quotidian objects with recognizable structures. If this might, as some have noted, lead to a confusion between “art and fact,” it is purely superficial because these pictures of things differ from the things themselves in a crucial way. Like a famous parable by Jorge Luis Borges in which the author attempts to replicate Don Quixote de la Mancha but finds that even the most accurate copy is, in the end, entirely different from the original, Los Carpinteros’ drawings provide everything to a detail needed to reproduce the object, but what is drawn so carefully turns out not to be the thing at all, but something completely different.

Los Carpinteros’ version of a traffic barrier of a stack of boxes, a fountain or a swimming pool derive their meaning, or more accurately their narratives, not by how they look, but primarily through how they are made. No matter how recognizable the object, this emphasis on the structure of things conjures associations between what the subject looks like and what it could be – lightbulb-bird, pool-gun, etc.: in other words, it created metaphor. If there is an element of fantasy bordering on a kind of Surrealism evident in their humorous transformations and visual puns it is a Surrealism in a waking, rather than dream world, more akin to Picasso than Dali. There is something of Duchamp as well in their trickery, but as Alexander Arrechea has declared, “We love Marcel Duchamp. But Marcel Duchamp doesn’t love us.” And how could he? Duchamp was an enemy of metaphor – from perspective onward – and Los Carpinteros’ work unquestionably relies on it. It is inconceivable, for example, that Duchamp would present a bottle rack altered so that it might allude to something beyond its dual identities as object and art; it is equally inconceivable that Los Carpinteros would present a bottle rack, or for that matter, a drawing of it, without that allusive alteration.

This re-introduction of the metaphorical takes on a certain significance at this moment in international contemporary art, a moment when the hegemony of doctrinaire Duchampian anti-visuality is slowly giving way to a softer Duchampian-inflected appreciation for the quotidian object itself and the poetry it might inspire. If, as argued earlier, Los Carpinteros’ drawings do not depict objects in the world, but rather objects that have some connection to things recognizable, but are not those things, their drawings, so carefully illusionistic, so impeccably realized in every detail and proportion, also present themselves as autonomous, allusive, but detached from exact reference.

Just as the subject of each drawing creates associative metaphors that elucidate and embroider upon its meaning, it is possible to see drawing itself, in Los Carpinteros’ practice, as a metaphor for their entire artistic enterprise. As the name of the group so graphically demonstrates, Los Carpinteros take much of their inspiration from the notion of work in its most material sense – that is, from the tradition of the trades and from the notion of master craftsmanship.

Their “working drawings” are the graphic embodiment of the notion of the making of an art object, a kind of drawing as work. Those drawings that are unrelated to realizable projects-what Yves Alain Bois has called “projective drawing” – cannot help but relate to the artistic concept – the pure idea. Most poignantly perhaps, all of Los Carpinteros’ drawings are metaphors for the communication among the three artists and for collaboration, not towards specific ends but for its own sake. “Drawings are the letters we write each other,” Marco Castillo has said. It is indeed a rich and allusive correspondence.