By design
Franck Gautherot
Black line drawing on a white surface has for many years constituted Michael Scott's practice. Various rules have been elaborated to create his paintings: a gradual thickening of lines by 1% increments in a series of 39 paintings, for example. Optical confusion and a manual obsession for an impossible perfection circumscribe one of the aspects of the artist's art.
Since 2007, ink drawing on a single sheet of paper has grown in importance in his work, to such an extant that it has seemed imperative to me to gather over a hundred of them in a book. This volume marks the beginning of The Drawing Centre series, edited according to visual patterns and intuitions that either reinforce one another or significantly diverge.
The body of work proposed hereafter offers a representative overview of Michael Scott's drawing practice—technical mastery, precision and balance in craftsmanship, in the service of themes that blend the reinterpretation of contemporary art masterpieces or artworks by artists close to him with thematic improvisations where plumbing, architecture and a few misidentified characters compete for space in the book.
Drawing is that little thing we insisted on avoiding for decades, expunging from our archives embarrassing sketchbooks, colorful diaries and formless notes defacing reams of blank paper that were not asking for so much.
Nobody is spared the grace of art and even the toughest, most skeptical people fall back on prayer, ritual, and hymn singing. On drawing as well. A sudden desire to use printed matter as a vessel for drawings commissioned to artists according to our taste thus finds its realization with this first installment devoted to Michael Scott.
Born in 1958, known for his black and white paintings—painful for the eyes—then for his colored paintings—painful for the eyes, on acid—then for his variations of concentric circles, then for his forays into painted drawings, not unlike Peter Saul (to be brief), then for his constant returns to all of the above; as an unrepentant draftsman Michael Scott has nurtured a small secret preserve, as gracious foreword writers would put it. Compulsive, literal, direct, immediate, somber, a Max Linder-like prankster, Scott's drawing practice is much more than an appendix to his painting, taking into account a personal history of contemporary art cranked through his own obsessions.
Giving himself permission to make sketches of artworks created by his close friends—a
Steven Parrino “
misshapen canvas,” an
Olivier Mosset black circle, a
Franz West chair made of concrete rebars, Jessica Diamond wall slogans,
Imi Knoebel Masonite volumes, a Cady Noland filled basket and so on, up until William Burroughs's hat hanging on the wall of his bedroom in the late
John Giorno's
Bunker. Scott is not a poster child for unrepentant image collectors, or for eternal students sketching from nature in a notebook.
His drawn landscape is hilly, populated with trees and ladders, with walls blocking up the space's perspective, with Guston-like plumbing, with abstract washes. It unfolds hours of contemplation, long improvised sessions on the white paper sheet, arduous back-and-forths between thin brush and inkwell, quickness of thoughts and deviations from everyday things.
With his characteristic exactness, Scott has thought out drawing and nevertheless spared some space and time for the absolute freedom and graphic spontaneity that his line paintings—painful for the eyes—didn't allow anymore.
