!?instructions>Steven Baelen
vita and artist statement of Steven Baelen
I consider drawing as the very subject of my work. Rooted in the passion to delineate my intimate surrounding by pencil on paper, I have understood the drawing in its fragility & ephemerality, but I have been using exactly this value in order to enforce the power that a drawing material can produce. By shifting the usage of my drawings within and across other supports and media: from the notebooks to the drawings, from the photocopies of the latter to further reframed or enlarged digital or pictorial compositions, the shift from one medium to another makes me feel how important it is to think of a drawing as a tool to achieve and understand the possibility to develop a practice in which search and experiment is central.
This is particularly obvious in “Replica” where an original drawing from one of my notebooks has been analytically de- or re-structured into a code. Should one want to recompose the drawing, one just would have to carefully type out the given instructions line after line on the same sheet of paper.