Written by Mara Verna

Drawing Collaborations features the transatlantic collaboration between Guerreiro (Portugal) and Mastroiacovo (Canada). Together, they push at processes that embrace materiality and expanded notions of authorship through the lens of drawing. The concept of gesture is equally explored beyond the image, which opens up a potential for ethical and political dimensions. Gesture comes to surface in traces, the ephemeral, where process is made visible without arriving at any particular ends.

Within the dry transfer lettering system and adhesive symbols and pattern making, bold notions of normativity or hegemony are utilized to refer to prescribed, identifiable visual signs and symbols. They are instructions rule making and inscription, a constitutive act. Guerreiro and Mastroiacovo explore this system, these markings, which they describe as found compositions. 

The horizontal drawing installation titled normatone / normacolor displays an assemblage of image markings, through the tinted looking glass, permitting the function of the light table to trace a certain kind of poetry. The root word, ‘norma’ would seem amplified. These are rules they tell us. Mapping is performed not just through collation, juxtaposition, reflex and multiplicity but also engaging a materiality that pushes the past into present shape and form. A new kind of potentiality for mark making is performed when these aggregate directives are encountered and played out other than as intended. It evidences the possibility of a recoded landscape tilted on its face, looking up.

Untitled is a video projection encountered in vertical, body scale. Multiple line weights perform a fluctuating set in gradations of erasure, resurgence and superimposition. These expressive relations are manifold – built up or erased from one layer to the next albeit preserved in their integrity as iterations already partially played out. Texture is wrapped around. Corner markings shift left then right as compelled acts of reading. Lines and curves as type face, display face – it is a sort of portraiture. These are utterances like speech sounds in articulation endured through traces of drawn gesture.

Set into context, the digital print titled Hospedaria would seem to function as a sort of choreographed spotting technique to bridge the various elements across these works. Hospedaria reanimates the idea of residual ephemera by acting as weathered witness, worn by exposure, and holds reverential status not easily discarded as an evolving subtractive process.

The meaning of hospitality derives from Latin and refers to the relationship between guest and host, and describes a generosity of reception as a hospitable practice. Across these works, the interplay of form and function is recalibrated through the concept of hospitality much like cross hatchings in dynamic tension.

Guerreiro and Mastroiacovo push against these tensions in their encounter with these found compositions and even through the employ of light, which itself functions as a mechanism of inscription. Through these openings, Guerreiro and Mastroiacovo reactivate and recode. That is their drawing substrate.