La part du dessin

ELAC Gallery of the ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne presents “Pierre Charpin — la part du dessin” where the French designer exhibits some hundred drawings.

If you look closely at the essential purity of objects designed by Pierre Charpin, you will notice a form of discretion, or even frailty.

This delicacy is characteristic of a presence that beckons to us rather than pose as a sign. This “poetic” trait in his work is contributed by drawing. Indeed, for Pierre Charpin, drawing has never been just a step in the object production process. It is a practice in its own right which, on the one hand, singles out his signature and, on the other, reflects a relationship more innate to the form.

This is why in recent years the corpus of his work includes – along with sketches of objects finalised upon production – “drawings of drawings”. Produced in large formats, these aspire to no further reality than their own.

View of the exhibition "Pierre Charpin, La part du dessin", ELAC Gallery, ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne

In series of four, of three or sometimes alone, these drawings provide the opportunity of a direct and immediate approach to the world of forms, in line with his artistic training. For it is first and foremost through drawing that a world emerges, appearing before us. Drawing acquires poetic power through the simple economy of its means – a pencil, a surface – and its desire to bring forth the form. Poiesis, in ancient Greek, tells of the creation of a world… by the power of the gods, by the hand of man.

Pierre Charpin, La part du dessin, l'elac — View of the exhibition "Pierre Charpin, La part du dessin", ELAC Gallery, ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne

Free from the constraints of production, without any other purpose than that imposed by their own momentum, the forms drawn by Pierre Charpin unfold in playful freedom. This is a search, a journey of hand and thought towards a form that is not yet clear, although he may perhaps glimpse it. By endless repetitions of the same gesture, by chromatic variations on the same line or the same point, this tension becomes a plastic strength, an inner dynamism which involves the viewer’s eye in the emergence of form. This is where intimate and solitary pleasure turns into a silent and discreet invitation to read between the lines, and beyond the lines, before any shape occurs, the sheer spectacle of art in the making. Alessandra Fanari