El potencial subversivo del dibujo

Abstract

The phenomenon that rise this reflection is the proliferation of contemporary works of art where drawing emerges in an unprecedented way, surpassing the secondary role that has been assigned to it for centuries in Western art. This shift deserves attention because it can reveal aspects that exceed the simple disciplinary ascription; We believe that its analysis has the potential to discover intentions and wills that contemporary artists share and find their way through this millenary discipline. What guides this text is not, therefore, an analysis of the formal elements of traditional drawing, but an attempt to find conceptual aspects inherent to the discipline that are capitalized by certain artists as reflective poetics. We will try to investigate in this sense, what aspects, values or constitutive features of drawing are especially attractive for contemporary artists —what courses allows— in order to think whether their specificity implies a different political positioning from that enabled by Major Arts. In this search we choose to accent the critical potential that, we understand, contains drawing. If a discipline of a relatively minor aesthetic and economic value —in comparison with Major Arts— acquires an unusual prominence, we can infer that it may be an uprising. If painting and sculpture were the preferred means of propaganda and diffusion of the hegemonic power, we understand that drawing —as a precarious discipline— possesses the disruptive potential necessary to dismantle ossified hierarchical structures. We propose an analysis of the roles of drawing, from the Renaissance to the present, to approach from this perspective the reflection on the conceptual operations deployed by two contemporary artists in whose work drawing is axial: Eulalia de Valdenebro (Colombia) and Kara Walker (USA)