Graphitic Assemblages Francesco Stocchi, Rotterdam, 2014

The Olduvai stone chopping tool is one of the oldest holdings of the British Museum and presumably one of the earliest substantiations of human culture. It was unearthed in 1931 by the young British archaeologist Louis Lecky in Olduvai Gorge, a deep cleft in northern Tanzania in the East African Rift Valley. The find pushed the chronology of human history considerably back, from 4004 BC, when theologists believed Adam and Eve existed, to 1 or 2 million years ago. This beautifully dense rock, shaped by man with irregular, discontinuous lines, works as a unique time-capsule. A close look reveals that the edge is formed by a deliberate sequence of skilfully placed blows of more or less uniform force. Many objects of the same type, made in the same way, occur in groups called “assemblages” which are occasionally associated with early human remains. By contrast, natural forces strike randomly and with variable force; no pattern, purpose or uniformity can be seen in the modifications they cause.

One of the qualities of art I am most inclined towards is its ability to allow us to travel through time. A masterwork is an artist’s pact with immortality and, in relating to it, the artwork is at the same time a witness to its time and an agent of the contemporary. This relation is refreshed constantly, each and every time we are confronted to it. In Marc Nagtzaam’s drawings I find the density, irregularity and striving that time can dispense. The work is defined by the same opposing forces found in the Olduvai stone. Pre determination vs improvisation, randomness vs order, regularity vs serendipity. Nagtzaam collaborates with time, holding himself steady between thought and emotion: his work is about control and losing grip, in a continuous attempt to get out of himself. Failing in some initial principles and then trying to fail better, as Becket would have advised.

Nagtzaam’s approach to his work evokes the process of the collage. A combination of associative ideas rooted in predetermined elements extracted from sketches, with the movement of the hand, the vibrating, imprecise circle marks of a pencil. The grid seems to impose a certain logic, but the slight variations between the circles and the seemingly arbitrary location of the elements on the sheet of paper indicate resistance to a strictly deterministic system. Nagtzaam, on the threshold of the passion for minimalism, follows the tradition of some early avant-garde artists and later of some post-minimalists in an un-dogmatic manner. Anti-ideological figures who subverted the grid to serve their own purposes, reasserting the hand of the artist and, with it, variation and unpredictability. Nagtzaam’s act of drawing is solitary, self-absorbing and highly intimate, but it is still fundamentally widespread. Drawing is one of the handful of activities common to all mankind, in any period and at any cultural latitude, just like singing, running, laughing. We have all drawn at some point, repeatedly even, because it is the earliest tangible, accessible and direct way of communicating. When we look at a drawing, each one of us can create a personal relationship to it based on our familiarity with the medium. We rarely feel like strangers in front of a drawing, or acknowledge we don’t have the tools to understand it. In addition, Nagtzaam uses primary geometrical forms as an un-referential, universal language arranged in a highly idiosyncratic manner: imperfect, outside the self-assigned borders, outside the system, outside the rules. These apparently quiet, Zen-like graphite compositions are in fact subversive, chaotic, bearing inextricable enigmas. Where do these forms come from? What do they refer to? What narrative may they suggest? As a matter of fact, Qui Prodest ?

This approach reminds us of an independent voice in the De Stijl movement, the artist-architect-theorist Georges Vantongerloo whose work distinguished itself as unstable and “imperfect”. It carries the drama of the factual and the concrete, evoking the contingencies of a panorama, despite its absorbed abstraction. Its dynamic is horizontal, with no precise focal point; it is syncopated and controlled, contradictory even. Vantongerloo was deeply inspired by M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, who was advocating for an eternal super-reality hidden behind ordinary everyday reality which expresses itself in opposites. A binary, yin-yang logic of composition, 0 to 1, black to white. Schoenmaekers also showed us that it was possible to take a scientific peek into this eternal mystical world by means of meditation on simple geometric figures and their symbolic meanings. He would contemplate horizontal and vertical lines, then circles and ellipses, and Vantongerloo’s reliance on a rectilinear grid was replaced by rounded forms and curves, softening the severe character of his compositions which felt awkward, almost intuitively wrong. This increased freedom took place particularly after Vantongerloo founded the Abstraction-Création group in 1931 which intended to promote pure abstraction. It was more permissive and less dogmatic than De Stijl, welcoming abstract artists of all stripes.

The absence of naturalistic features and the artist’s denial of narrative sources are not the only features that make Nagtzaam’s work self-referential and his practice tied-up with modernistic principles. His work attempts to mitigate the shortcoming of Modernism with intuition, chance and improvisation as a means of exploring the formal and perceptual relationships between an artwork and its viewer. There is no adoption of formulas, and there is nothing like a “Zen style”. Zen gardens can be very different from one another. Zen is a part of the viewer’s outlook. We must look on in a Zen state of mind and then we can engage in “Zen gardening”, which changes the entire subject of self-referentiality. Nagtzaam’s drawings call for contemplation, in an absorbed state of mind: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one see” (Robert Irwin). Employing positive/negative spatial relationships, shining white rectangular spaces, the perceptual properties of the work shift in the eyes of the beholder and are exalted by a vibrating (at first glance concealed) gestural pattern. There is no randomness, rather improvisation with intent, as Nagtzaam travels within patterns exploring their edges. The work shifts from sign to surface under a personal criteria of decisions, such as quantity, rhythm and force.
Do the works hide some numerological truth? In Richard Serra’s understanding of drawings, by instance, black is not a color but rather a material; it therefore has weight and responds to the laws of gravity. On the contrary, Nagtzaam sets the frequency of his practice dim and low, nonetheless embracing black as a dimensional artifice. Through this absorbing atmosphere, he explores surface effects further. The process of creation remains an essential aspect of his expressive power that conveys a visceral sense of his attachment to process, lightness and composition as a result of his labor.

Nagtzaam introduces a resolute emphasis on material, process, and scale, engaging actively with the viewer by conceiving drawing as a possible spatial phenomenon. The sheets of paper hanging in the room resemble windows to an outer space, a space to suggest one’s quixotic projections. The juxtaposition of drawings is canalized into a single entity which doesn’t represent, rather creates space. Multitude becomes a whole of an environmental understanding of the graphical sign. To see, one should add to perception some intangible components, such as imagination or faith, the argomentum non apparentium. This status of drawings as components, believing on each others rather than solitary, disinterested expressions of the surrounds, set the viewer at the center, encircling him. A room presenting Nagtzaam’s drawings immerses you in his stringent vocabulary of geometric shapes, some on paper or directly on to the wall. It signals his singular devotion to black B-graphite as his only drawing instrument, with the exception of his wall drawings, which may contemplate color.
Genuinely radical, the choice of using limited, essential resources accentuates his penchant for opacity and reformulation of a spatial representation. When a multitude is converted through representation into an cogent unity, in Hobbe’s terms representation carries a transformative force propelled by man’s imagination to create prospects, which are in turn capable of envisioning and rescaling his surroundings. But because of its power, representation is also potentially subversive. It might devolve into uncontrolled power, and it therefore needs to be controlled, or rather orchestrated.

Nagtzaam’s practice might be seen as belonging to the cult of the late modernist abstraction, with its emphasis on materiality, process and pure perception, unaffected by imagistic associations. However, language plays a decisive role in the deviation from this legacy, apparent both in the text works and in the titles given to the drawings which bring back to the factual, establishing the extent to which his works act as dense time-containers, despite their small, malleable, portable format. In the text works, the letters become forms and images themselves, more to be seen than to be read. Is the artist writing or depicting the image of a text? Even if we knew where these texts came from, we would have no idea where are they going. Are they excuses for miscellaneous representations, or a way to affirm form beyond semantic connotations?
Gentle but powerful, Nagtzaam’s work attempts to minimize the degree of imagery and to maximize the energy in a condensed surface, radiating space around the drawing. Recurring forms and intermittent rhythms are the result of an absorbing practice, which withdraws from an inclusive referential reading in order to reestablish the inquiry of a perceptual, immersive intensity.