MIKLOS ONUCSAN

Pseudo-’ is both ‘quasi-’ and ‘anti-’, failure and contestation, insufficiency or surplus. Using the dynamic deviation the word produces as a kind of prefix to both denote and de-nature his graphical output from the 1980s, Miklós Onucsán is perhaps thinking of the theoretically subaltern status of drawing in the hierarchy of artistic modalities, of what is ‘proper’ to the preparatory sketch, of the point at which drawing might become something else, all these thresholds being first materialized or visualised, and then transgressed in the works. Drawing is staged here as paradoxical object like those imagined by Zeno of Elea, placed in a class of logical problems where, for instance, distances cannot be crossed by athletes in pursuit of slower competitors or by arrows flying towards their targets, but rather become incompressible as they break into infinite segments and half-segments, implode into an endless diminishment of ever-smaller separations. An aesthetics of calculation – and perhaps a sensuousness of perplexity – grow from the logical netherworld to which such paradoxes expose the mind. Drawing here is never really achieved and always overcome: pre-figured and then flooded with ‘improper’ material that perturbs its spatial or temporal armature and muddles its boundaries to other mediums. It is saturated with inklings and slippages, with marks of past and future events. The ‘pseudo-’ is then an under- and over-performance, the excess of a deficit in the application of the various norms that define what constitutes a drawing. (Mihnea Mircan)