JEROME ZONDER

Between France and Korea, Jerome Zonder continues to heighten the geographic amplitude of his work. This exhibition deepens the intensive research of drawing’s limits, which resounds with the extent of our perceptions. It extends a polygraph’s undertaking, not only by increasing the diversity of his practices, but also by refining the ability to take into account emotional reactions. The experimentation consists of the continuous process of drawing’s excess, its formal implementation, as in its subject matter. The codes of representation are exhausted in the virtuosity of their use until it breaks. Techniques overlap until their merger: charcoal, graphite, India ink, aerosol paint … a density which sometimes requires the scratching of lines The exhaustion of drawing (often in tandem with physical exhaustion) produce narrations and the exhaustion of stories produce drawing: a friction which advances the system. Through this process which is a continuous discontinuity, the drawing escapes the deliberate initiative or intentional approach to self-re-generate. By exceeding its codes, the innocence of the picture (such as childhood shown) is corrupted to give place to a drawing which builds itself, a kind of desiring-machine, a body in movement, at once subject and object of imaging. The drawing eludes both its own limits of scales and dimensions:the story gives the narrative material to compose a face, and then the mask is taken out of the leaf to become an object made up with the materials of the drawing, to become once again a character of the narrative. This research cannot stop going on until the end of the drawing while knowing that it leads nowhere. This continuous excess is felt in a tense space. Between the absolute technical control from the codes and the will to break them, between the precision and the dereliction, between the unit of basic forms and the multiplicity of the syntax, between the surface and the depth of the leaf, between plans and dimensions of the drawing, between a body subject of imagination and object of narration, between black and white… a continuous tension animates every figure as much in the sublime comfort as in the illness of the farcical violence. At once intensive and extensive, each drawing is a tense zone, a ridge line with unstable but elaborated balance. This dynamic exceeds limits of drawing, sometimes up to the frame whose colors strengthen the choice of grey’s contrast.