The practice and redefinition of drawing are central axes in the work of Diogo Pimentão (Lisbon, 1973). Mostly using paper and graphite, sometimes combining them with cement, acrylic plaster or wood, as well as producing works of video and performance, the artist’s pieces challenge the traditional boundaries of the discipline.

Diogo Pimentão regards the exhibition space as a pre-existing drawing, a structure that already contains a lot of information. Each gesture that takes place there leaves a mark on the space and on the person who crosses it. It is through movement, confrontation, exchange and action that knowledge and know-how are produced. Rather than being a static register, drawing makes its poetic nature visible in the meeting between materials and intentions. 

The artist is drawn to the instant of tension when something is ready to transform, that delicate and tangential point at which two forms touch, the coincidence, the threshold moment between being born and breaking. Like an egg: when it is cracked, it is no longer the same, but it is through that gesture that it communicates, lives and ‘dies’. 

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Paper, supposedly fragile, reveals capacities that only exist because it is taken beyond its expected function. All of this stems from a broader understanding of the nature of matter. The artist speaks of his immense pleasure at discovering the philosophical matter of drawing in the density of the experience that can make something visible. Pieces are and are not objects; they convey the ‘Leonardo-esque’ notion of drawing as extension without breadth: they are crude, vulnerable, unprotected, rejecting the logic of fixed frames within the space, preferring to inhabit the boundaries of the possible.

In ‘Transient Force of Things’, the Drawing Room displays works that result, in part, from performative actions featuring Diogo Pimentão, in collaboration with the French dancer and choreographer Emmanuel Eggermont.