Graphopoiesis, the living capacity of unruly drawing
The works that make up Lo ingobernable were made by Mischa Dabul with a unique and very personal procedure, using the same tools and materials for the entire set. However, trying to identify each of its elements would be an astonishingly artificial act since by observing its delicate pieces we can infer that life, in its ungovernable sprouting, created them.
Every living being is, according to biologist Humberto Maturana, a closed system that is continually creating itself and, therefore, repairing, maintaining and modifying itself. The simplest example we can imagine is that of a wound that, sooner rather than later, heals. At this point, biology and philosophy join hands – or elbow – to give a name to the creative capacity of the living: poiesis. We are facing an act of pure poiesis – Martin Heidegger points out – when we observe “the flower blooming, the butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or the fall of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt.” Alive is everything that is changing. Mischa Dabul’s works are also the indication of an unfolded life – a vital graph, a recently pronounced language; As life, she participates as a tool and matter; It is as much a tool as the nib and as much material as ink and paper.
The degree of identity between the parts is such – I insist, isn’t Mischa herself a procedure? – that this exhibition could be thought of as a vivisection of the artist: skin-deep works that are also bodies occupying, along with the people who visit it, the space of the room. The light panels of blue inks and Japanese reminiscence are, curiously, the same height as the artist; panels in which translucency reveals the process of adding layer upon layer and thus discovering – or is it covering? – what lives in the depths of the essence; panels that show a graphopoiesis, or the living capacity of a drawing that dictated itself while the artist barely seemed to intervene, letting her shoulder, arm, elbow, hand, fingers, be simple instruments of that which grows in blue or in black, there, in front of your eyes.
In another part of the room, opening to a more domestic poetics, we find a table – a preferential sign to represent the work – that shows how the artist proceeds in her task of listening to the drawing. It is covered by the works as they are made before hanging vertically. To appreciate them in their details, we have to tilt our body and adopt a gesture that is very similar to surrender; We are invited to revolve around the installation given the ability to be observed without a privileged point of view.
I like to imagine a God who, instead of playing dice, has been staring for a while but lost at some distant point, scribbling drawings on a cosmic paper. A God who lets himself be carried away by that guide that, before putting down the nib, already existed in the form of liquid and shapeless ink. A guide that is channeled by touching the paper into one, two, three, hundreds of concatenated lines. Lines that give the plot of a skin that grows without any direction other than that dictated with such subtlety that its voice is barely heard. Because when we observe the works of Mischa Dabul we have the direct intuition that other times and other spaces exist; His works are indications that it is possible, that there are still lines that escape at the rhythm of everyday life. Faced with the quagmire into which we are pushed by the arrogance of a time that does not stop and a space that is increasingly reduced to the domestic sphere, Mischa’s strange epidermal graphics expose, with subtlety, a way of being vulnerable but present, too present.
Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias Nuñez, spring 2020
