Many of us, who have read Honoré Balzac’s philosophical novel Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu (the Unfinished Masterpiece), were compelled by the protagonist, Maître Frenhofer. Similarly, many of us were struck by Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of Paul Cézanne beating his chest and saying, “Frenhofer, C’est moi.” “I am Frenhofer!” To this day, even though we’re at the moment in our fourth phase of Postmodernism, the resonance of Frenhofer’s profound predicament that lies between his aspiration to commit himself to the purity of line, which manifests through a rational construct of Neoclassicism, and his attraction to the emotional spontaneity, evoking the spirit of Romanticism through color has proven to be vital and critical to our perpetual struggle to reach yet another pictorial synthesis that would depict out most precarious state of affairs.
For the former led by the example of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, the latter by Eugene Delacroix, Frenhofer eventually surrenders to his deepest despair, which leads him to the destruction of all his works as well as his own death. This profound clash between Neoclassicism and Romanticism–a desire of conserving the glory of the past of Western history while reaching towards the progressive vision of the future–can also be read as a genesis of Modernism, which gradually became a perpetual ongoing permutation of such a language that we came to embody our own existence, that constantly requires a reconciliation between the immediate and distant past, and the temporality of present and future time. To some extent, one can think of this dualism as a relationship between philosophical or poetic intention and aesthetic expectations, between representation and reality that ultimately leads to what the artist’s aim to communicate something from a made object, and how the public respond to it. We can all recognize the so-called masterpiece remains to be forever “unknown,” for it is unachievable, hence unknowable, and incommunicable indeed.
Concurrently, while we generally acknowledge Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu may had inaugurated a new beginning of our conversation, including looking, thinking, writing about the relationship between literature and art, we also accept whatever the psychological conditions we may draw upon, be it consciously or unconsciously, we appreciate the discipline of drawing as an expressive medium with the advantage of permanence. Not only drawing as a legitimate art form, it reveals the immediacy of artist’s soul. As Ingres once proclaimed, “The drawing is three fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over my door to the atelier, I would write: School of drawing, and I'm certain that I would create painters. Whereas Delacroix remarked, “Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn then drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.”
This is to say drawing has its own geography, temperature, and logic. All of which constitute a language that needs to be cultivated, deepened that we can reassure each artist is solely aware of their own measures of self-expression, depending on specific contexts. I’ve always treasured drawing as the truest presentation of what any artist would have wished to materialize an image that he or she had in their mind. In regarding to this selection, which I had the pleasure to organize according to the sheer response of all what I saw: the experience at once reminded me in the spirit of democratic learning and making, each drawing reflects how each image is made by a certain material, and above all, a specific speed of execution whereby the simultaneity of the artist’s thinking and feeling is fully revealed. To draw is to express how the inner world can be manifested as an endurance of human’s wisdom that is at once a summation of the artist’s constant mediation between strength and vulnerability, certitude and inaptitude, success, and failure. Above all, to draw is to perpetuate the beginning and the end with the wonderment of human’s spirit.
-Phong Bui