Artistic Drawing and Thought Expression: CAFA Drawing Retrospective 2009-2015

Abstract

Artistic drawing is one of the disciplines of fine arts; it is the art of embellishing our spaces; a means for the artist to express his thoughts and the medium he uses to provide the viewer with a reading of society. The artist finds in it an indispensable mode of expression. Let us specify that "thought", the concept we refer to in this dissertation, concerns only the artist's intentions, the vision of the world, and the interpretation of social realities. Knowing that the expression of thoughts has a pre-established path which is: speaking or writing, it is not daring to attribute the communicative function to drawings. Thus, is there any expressiveness in the images? Let us see if we can read the drawing like a book. Does the artist use the same writing tools as a writer? Can he describe all the social, historical, and cultural realities by drawing them? By studying this art and visiting museums of history, we realized that, with "the drawing as a historical document", it was possible to reconstruct past events. Indeed, from this point of view, we analyzed the content of the drawing to arrive at certainty. Therefore, the artist catches social, historical, and cultural realities to interpret them and suggests a pictorial reading with triple value: aesthetic, historical, and cultural. From the collection of data, we assemble information on the drawings exhibited at the CAFA, on the original artworks, and in the 798 gallery survey reports (Contemporary Arts Space, Beijing) to conclude by posing the problem of the expressiveness of the artistic drawing and trying to solve the enigma to enlighten the reading of this pictorial writing.