Defined as,”a black porous residue obtained by the destructive distillation of animal or vegetable matter in a limited supply of air”, charcoal, and our use of it, extends back as far as human history.

Originally employed as an artists’ material some 30,000 years ago to make some of the first art, cave paintings, its use and importance has continued to grow ever since.

 

Many beautiful preparatory drawings survive from the Renaissance and once ‘fixing’ methods were developed during the 16th century, artists such as Albrecht Durer came to regard charcoal drawings as finished works in their own right. The tradition endures with contemporary artists like William Kentridge and Robert Longo using charcoal as their primary material, and Anslem Kiefer and David Nash using it both sculpturally and as a drawing medium.

 

Working with this most simple and long-standing of materials and in the same format as each other (A1 sugar paper) Soledad Bustos and Anna Gardiner use drawing as a non-verbal, flexible thinking process. Charcoal is very alter-able, one swipe and the image disappears or is smudged and can be rethought.

 

Its immediacy is vital and its intimacy remarkable (Paul Gaugin referred to his drawings as, “my letters, my secrets”). There is no tool between the artist and the material, just the artist’s hand, making Henri Matisse note that, “drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence”.

 

On view is the considerable range of mark-making and striking tonal qualities of the medium from Gardiner’s expressive, velvety blackness to Bustos’s tender draughtsmanship and lightness of touch.

 

Bustos’s slightly larger-than-life-size double heads, floating in space, engage with the external world and with each other, drilling away at first attempts to place them. Are these real people and where are they from? What is their relationship with each other? There is no context, allowing the viewer to introduce their own narrative, and to change that narrative frequently.

 

Gardiner’s large skies and rustling grasses embrace and then confound the traditions of the English landscape through abstracted elements of telegraph lines and utilitarian fences. Is this an actual place and how does it speak to my own understanding of what nature and art and landscape mean?

 

Both artists have what might be termed elements of ‘portrait’ in their work but while the specific origin of a particular person or house or tree- from life and from found images- gives authority to the rendering of it, neither artist is concerned with representation. Transformative properties take centre stage here.

 

Edward Degas said, “Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see”, and in Twofold, as each artist moves away from their source to create an imagined world addressing ideas of expectation, familiarity and archetype, we recognize it is so.