The drawings of the series ‘Solitários e Inofensivos’ [Solitary and Harmless] are part of a highly personal artistic universe, crowded by distinctively shaped beings that inhabit the darkness of a parallel or marginal existence. The work of Susanne Themlitz pursues, with a steady insistence, the eccentric and fabulous, creating characters, microcosms and taxonomies that destabilize our perceptual habits.

This untitled work has an inherently playful nature: we are ironically and interrogatively called upon by a scrutinizing gaze, as if we were unknown entities, foreigners in a private universe. The expressiveness of this disconcerting stare is, on all accounts, underscored by the effects of contrast and the high angle perspective the drawing imposes on us.

Confronted with this eruption of the unfamiliar, free from the constraints of reason, imagination turns out to be the creative impulse, and an inexhaustible resource, in the artist’s work.

CC
May 2010