First draft, witness of the unconscious, sign of a primitive liberation of the thought which escapes, sometimes goes astray by pathology, the doodle mixes notions of spontaneity which blurs and intertwines the lines, with a regressive conception of the drawing going from the research of purity to childishness. Its authors are often not very neat, poorly drawn: children, maniacs, convicts... A whole fauna that art brut taught us to revere and served as a standard for Dada as well as the situationists. Only, since the Magdalenian, the artists of the Grotte des Trois-Frères confuse their features by incising free signs and scrapings. And, if the piles of the Capitol always carry the apotropaic graffiti of the faithful of all hairs, the margins of the illuminated manuscripts are going to play for a long time of a packed calligraphy to underline, comment, cross out. Whether it covers the wall of an ancient city or the vellum from monastic productions, the scribble oscillates between creation and vandalism and knows a real phase of questioning with the arrival of the Renaissance, jealous of its concept of painting-thought. It was then conceived as the counterpart of idealism and it is not insignificant that the undisputed masters of these heroic times sacrificed to the pleasure of regressive and expressive drawing.

Extract from the article by Vincent Quéau published in the N°105 de la revue Art Absolument. Publication date: March 17, 2023.

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