diary drawings

It almost looks as if Moussa Kone only needs one word to unravel his surreal imagery: curriculum vitae is the title of one of the 50 drawings from the series diary drawings, for example, which the artist began in the summer of 2009.

The drawing shows a, for Moussa typical, faceless crowd running for its life. This method, the taking of everyday words literally, plays a key role in Kone’s works, as the artist usually engages with everyday socio-political topics and attempts to communicate these with a critical approach in his works: these include the uniform movement of the crowd, but also the processes of social conditioning that govern the radius of an individual’s actions. That, as a result, one also often sees circus rinks in Kone’s pictures where animals or dancers show their tricks, is connected with this basic interest of the artist’s, who usually allows himself a week for each drawing.

In 2009, confronted with the task of completing a drawing per day, Kone created extra scope for himself by exchanging his otherwise thoroughly composed, conceptual approach for a flexible, experimental one. Greys are added to his drawings, which are usually restricted to black-and-white, as well as new cross-hatching techniques and, unusually for Kone’s work, more color.

The drawing ham would, for instance, have been a major break-away had the artist not conceived it as a diptych along with the drawing so: the former is a colorful wash of colors blending into one another, which one also sees in a far smaller form in the latter work, an otherwise black-and-white drawing. The colour drawing is presented in the latter as the page of a book being read by a man on a deserted island.

In Sanskrit Yoga, ham and so are thought of as the sounds of exhalation and inhalation, and while the artist is concerned here, too, with the inversion of dichotomies like inside and outside, before and afterwards, me and him, etc., with the introduction of color into the image lost in translation his own perspective as an artist is being addressed.

Also conceived as a picture within a picture, this work shows a painter before his easel, on which he is drawing the forest that Kone has depicted with dense cross-hatching in an interpretation using somewhat lighter colours.

Except for the drawing lazy day, where a sloth replaces the otherwise very elaborately constructed ornamental compositions, very few of the drawings imply anything about the artist’s private life or state-of-mind on the day they were made. Instead, in an al- most obsessive-looking manner, reflections on the different areas of life are expressed on a daily basis: among these are more banal matters such as food or even heartache (herzschmerz) as well as illnesses (HIV or meningitis, in FSME), or the relationship between the artist and the viewers.

Between the megalomania of a draftsman who has simply made his own (mass) audience, and other topics close to reality (including themes of particular significance in Austria such as suppressing, remembering, forgetting) emerge in the series, but also the most fantastical imaginings: hundlinge (Curs), for example, or ilse-bilse, who Kone depicts as a pair of giant twins.

At least for a couple of days over New Year, Kone liberated himself from the dominance of his figures and his, in general, not always easy, thoughts: the 7-part series firework was completed at the time, which almost counters the draftsman’s practice of translation in showing what is usually meant by the title.

Text by Christa Benzer, Vienna, 2011 (translated from German)