H. A. Anil Kumar  2006

Nesa Gschwends drawings depict faces. Her initial act of drawing the faces adds a lot of meaning to her final facial expressions. The expression of the artists face and other bodily movement, while making these faces, draws our attention towards her act of drawing more intensely. The strategy that she employs to draw our attention even away from her drawn images, is a curious cultural act in itself. The intended act to draw our gaze away from what is already being drawn is to bring your gaze back to the drawing. This break between these two acts of gazing changes the appearance of any existing drawing by Nesa. She treats the drawing sheets with wax and the waxed, drawn papers with pencil marks, simultaneously. It appears to be an act of preparing a base to contain an image upon it. However this spontaneous process of preparing and creating a drawing itself tends to become an enactment. This understanding of the movement of the artistic hand helps us to grasp the drawings more clearly. In the due process, the surface and the image begin to exchange roles. Waxed textures and the drawn faces mutually refuse to mark their own boundaries, independent of each other. These marks and surfaces are made up of mutually different materials.

In Nesas case, the surface and image intermingle wherein the image and background continuously float ambiguously. Nesas portrait-drawings express the modesty of being unable to face, to face the impossible. The smudged pencil marks, the clear lines that define specific physical features, play a dual role of representing and suggesting the elements that constitute a portraiture, both at the same time. The tactile quality of the wax plays a dualistic role: -As a mark of experience that a face might carry upon itself. They are also autobiographical anecdotes of a mature personality. The pencil marks have the ability to evoke an experience that one wants to erase off from ones mind, forever. -The admixture of wax and drawing that becomes a physical and sensory matter, like in a relief work, that one can feel, often even without touching it. Often it seems that there is a memory left behind. Currently we look at a sketch-on-a-paper and realize that it has become an act of the past. A set of lines make a drawing if it exists within the framework of a specific time and space. Nesas marks make us believe that they are so.

Factually speaking, they were so. She makes marks on a paper, with graphite pencil that repeats on different papers. Her drawings evoke an altogether different experience herein. In a way the same face seems to appear on different paper surfaces, at the same time-space configuration. To repeat her working method once again: Nesa marks, draws, treats the papers with wax, redraws on it, until there is no difference left between the marked textures of the wax and the pencil. Mostly the marks evoke the memory of tender-like faces. If the viewer wishes to look at it in his own way, the way we grasp the same story part in a film and a drama as if there is no mutual media difference that affects the narration. Gradually, we become aware of the paradox evident within these marks that vary from abstract to representational drawings.

Framing anthropological sites

Lets assume Nesas pencil marks to be maps of a sort. Mapping a set of marked, gestural drawing evokes the watchful eyes to redirect us to look at the set of drawings as a bunch of marks, a set of lines, something other than a static visual. So this leads us to follow the trace or the movement of the formation of a line as and when it is being formed. In other words, a display of several of Nesas drawings in any order, in any particular light evokes several physical movement of the hand that has also created them. These faces are not only visible, but their ambiguity in all their tactileness, is. So while looking at these drawings as mutually independent entities, they do not let the gaze settle upon them for too long. Hence Nesas graphic pencil marks, due to the way and reasons in which they are formed, are anthropological sites. You see the drawing as an extension of a mark in differing times, at differing space. So, the Kantian notion that any object, worth an experience, is bound by time-space formula is teased by Nesa. Also this teasing takes the form of different forms, yet to come, always in the future. Through this write-up, for instance, it takes the form of an anthropological mapping. It maps the movement of the artist, but not in a motorized way. The wax textures and pencil lines and smudges commix, violating the rule of a performer and platform. This is the essence of Nesas performance while sketching.

Final Display

When scores of Nesas face drawings are displayed together, they refuse to co-exist. Is it a single image seen differently in different frames? If so, the speed in which we need to grasp them as one is erased as if we are watching a movie film role in slots, frame after frame. The tactile quality of the waxed surface seem to push the drawing one layer behind. It could even be seen from behind. These machine-made papers are turned into personalised waxed papers. Each paper share the same waxed, plastic and graphite, graphic presence but each of them seem to contain a mobile-vision within. The face might laugh, be sullen, angry and finally, might refuse to reveal any of its expression. The sense of feel of these waxed-images is felt even without touching them. There is a whole list of accepted representational notions that Nesa puts to stake and teases in the process of creating one waxed-image. And her intention is not merely to draw the viewers experience of such ruptured notion towards the permanency of the drawing process and ambiguity of the still, drawing-faces.