dirty drawings

The series dirty drawings consists of 20 drawings and talks about the relationship between the artist, his material - ink on paper - and the image. Fingertips are able to feel much smaller details than the human eye could recognize. Touching the surface of the drawing while working on it, the artist “feels fine lines of dried ink standing on the paper. Art production is a much more bodily and intuitive experience than talking about it in the exhibition, looking for words and descriptions” (Kone). Moussa Kone shared the studio experience with his audience in this exhibition, permitting the artwork to be touched by visitors. He bridges the gap between the surface and the content, bringing forth the point of contact between the viewer and the usually well-preserved artwork and introduces a different, sensory level of bodily involvement with art. He drew close-ups of bodies on paper, often showing persons in an intimate social interaction.

He translated the three-dimensional shapes of bodies into dense, glimmering meshes of lines and created not only an image, but a touchable surface. In the exhibition the drawings were mounted on the walls with small magnets. The artwork was lacking the usual distant framing behind a protecting shield of glass and visitors were invited to touch the paper with their fingertips.

The blank space serves as the outline of the figures, thus the artist calls them “inverse drawings”. Over the time of the exhibition, the drawings “get dirty” (Kone). It’s a work about the sensual or sensory moments of drawing and art making in general, from the artist's perspective. A part of the series was featured in the FUKT magazine #16, the world’s best magazine for contemporary drawing.