Graphein, from Greek, means to carve or to scratch on a surface, to write. Gramma, also from Greek, means trace– written and drawn. The suffix derives from graphé, which can be understood as a letter of the alphabet. As such, the gram, the unit of weight, shares roots with gramma, as something that was very light in weight was comparable, in terms of size and lightness, to a letter, a trace or a small drawing. The first writings, drawings, messages were inscribed, painted, engraved, scraped into surfaces such as stone, earth and clay. Mankind recalls these facts all the time.

In the West, culture compartmentalized what emerged already intertwined: drawing and writing and also speech. With regard to that, Jacques Derrida boldly inquires: “Where does writing begin? When does writing begin? Where and when is this trace of writing in general, the common root of speech and writing, compressed into ‘writing’ in the current sense?”¹ The author wonders about the subject who chooses to look at themself while also looking at the world within, and who then presents this experience in a re-presentation. Writing and/or drawing are established and reflect, therefore, the subject and this painful investigation of the self and the surrounding world.

This web of origins, meanings, and their evolutions, and the desires to create worlds with traces, trails, writings, and drawings, that engender so much complexity (the order of discourse, the place of speech, the body that draws), presents itself as an approach for feeling out (almost erratically, and why not?) the works of Guga Szabzon (São Paulo, 1987) and José Damasceno (Rio de Janeiro, 1968). As a result, this is also part of the process behind selecting the works that comprise the Galeria Millan booth at the ArPa – Art Fair. The title of this project is teased from this same ball of yarn: Writing Is a Trace, Drawing Is a Breath. So, we have proposed an ambivalence, a superimposition and/or simultaneity, between writing and drawing, and the possibility of building a narrative that wanders through time: that of the trace (a gesture that took place and left marks) and that of the breath (that which, from the inside, spreads out, crosses over and adheres to things).

The first question, which involves writing and drawing, proposes that we think of an absence of the hierarchy which has long demarcated both the method and the function of each of these practices and which is manifested in ideas such as: writing is a statement of credibility, confirmed in the engraved word, while drawing is sketching, ornamentation or speculation.

Let us, then, look into the presence of the line in the works of Guga and Damasceno: it reveals itself in the drawing, by virtue of its own strength, leaving traces of a body and proposing the possibility of a relationship with another body. The line, as writing and as drawing, in works such as Beira [Edge] (2002), by Guga, passes through and demarcates spaces in the felt, leading and inviting the gaze to follow its weave. Then escapes, changing its orientation. And leaves traces. Writing and drawing, in the artist’s Indestrutível [Indestructible] (2019), constitute the word amidst a fragmentation of lines. The indestructible takes place in the explosion, a kind of “drawing-inscription” in which a dissociation occurs between word and image. In the works by Damasceno, the line appears in diverse materials, circumventing contours, as in Iguais [Equals] (2019); sewing scenes at once sad and hilarious, as in Isto não é um apito [This is not a whistle] (2020); and also positing cracks, as in Colmeia [Hive] (2016). The line determines differences and affinities between the work, the space, the material, and its compositions, “in the succession of little planes”, as Damasceno says of the work Elastisk Kino (2022). In these distinct events, Damasceno’s line is writing/drawing in and with the space.

A second issue risks an understanding of times that are allied to writing and drawing and, as such, may also contribute to reconfiguring these notions. As has been said, the formulations at play here, in relation to writing and drawing, to an extent attempt to wrong-foot the patently obvious and the conventions that surround them. Thus, the invitation is to visualize writing as a gesture that is a trace of the body, evidence of the body, shifting in the time and space of its making and perception. “Writing is written, yet it also ruins its own representation”, remarks Derrida. Writing, therefore, is seen to be freeing itself from its rigid, permanent, immutable order, since it is the action of the body and the body vibrates and changes. A temporal dimension of the drawing when allied with the breath is: that which throws itself into the world without needing to keep a contract with form. A breath that does not know its destiny and so spreads out. And changes the way that it adheres to spaces, things, surfaces, passing through them too. A formulation of drawing that is reconstituted in every instant, at times intending illegibility, at others, as a scratch or tear, or, sometimes, offering protection from its own self. Its threat is to expose itself, since it externalizes and then quickly remakes itself.

This is how, we can think, the drawings and writings of Guga and Damasceno are made – as events in the space, playing with the public, pluralizing and pulverizing. In these temporal voyages between drawing and writing: one is neither the structure nor the sketch for the other. And in the works of Guga and Damasceno, these hybridizations between writing and drawing, and between times appear to be constants, promoting intermeshing, ambivalences, exchanges, plastic un-limits. They also comprise a shared existence between the differences and singularities of poetics: Guga, in concentrating on drawing that punctures and creates paths in the felt, and Damasceno by proposing sculptural considerations and processes of object construction. Writing as drawing, drawing as writing, being a trace, being a breath.

These experiments, typical of those who look at the world and resist within it, do not point toward an incoherence of language (which is not all bad, given how categorization still terrifies artistic production), but rather, prior to this, they appropriate concepts deeply embedded in tradition so that they can then affect them, dismiss them, and so, in these inscriptions, make drawings, make writings, make languages, as Octavio Paz suggests, It slips: “between what I keep silent and what I dream,/ between what I dream and what I forget,/ [...] between the yes and the no:/ says/ what I keep silent/ silence/ what I say,/ dream/ what I forget./ It is not speech;/ it is an act./ It is an act of speech.”²

Galciani Neves is a professor and curator. She has a master’s and a doctorate degree in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP. She is the author of the book Exercícios críticos: gestos e procedimentos de invenção (Educ - SP and Fapesp, 2016). She develops curatorial projects that draw dialogues between art, literature and environmental issues. Currently, she is artistic-pedagogical director of Biblioteca-Floresta.

¹ Derrida, Jacques. Gramatologia. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011.

² Paz, Octavio. Arbol adentro – poemas (1976-1988). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988.