The Drawing Centre Family – Permanent Flood

In 1995, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Maurizio Cattelan implemented a simple, efficient idea to insure the recycling of magazine images had a virtuous, glittering second life. For the first issue, the two accomplices, with the participation of about fifty artists (among others), compiled torn pages from international magazines into a new visual narrative that flaunted anything and everything and then some more under the title Permanent Food. The saga continued, enlisting other acquaintances in the art world and beyond and asking them to send in turn one or several torn pages from magazines of their own choosing. In the following years, successes, academicisms, visual provocations and contradictions flourished, sometimes with the insertion of issues sold to brands or other sponsors, who dug into their own archive in their own way to fit to the magazine specifications.
When we recently floated the idea of a new collection of monographic books devoted to artists' drawings, a desire to simultaneously adjoin it with a sub-collection edited along the same collecting principle soon emerged: doodlings, following an idea with lines, tangled figures, outlines for audacious perspectives, urges to draw, to create dicks and pussies, nudes, caricatures, landscapes, cat loaves, chicken wire by way of geometry lessons, forgotten cities, fruit, or some small chiaroscuro pictures.
Let your ballpoint pen, your Montblanc fountain pen, your magic marker or your pencil flow. Imagine a cast that would earn a surprised comment, as if drawing was still an excuse, a positive point or a somewhat shameful, not fully assumed activity. Fashion designers, architects, product designers, graphic designers, blacksmiths and curators sullying reams of blank paper, spiral notebooks or notebooks sold in museum stores, composition books, vellum paper, Arches paper, and all this unfortunate paper pulp torn away from trees. Musicians draw their music on sheet music paper, engineers use graph paper––or so they did, back in the day.
Lead pencil, graphite pencil, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, dip pen, India ink, rub-on transfers, collages, montages, calligraphic writings, grocery lists, friends' names, traitors' names, days of the week, orgasms crossed out in two kinds of color on the bedroom wallpaper… permanent flood!