Drawing has always been central to Richard Tuttle's practice as an artist. He has declared that "art is discipline... and discipline is drawing." This suite of six untitled drawings charts a gradually fragmenting quartet of black squares (painted in gouache) on white board, as if some invisible force is slowly pulling them apart. Beginning in relatively tight, though destabilized, formation, by the fifth drawing the squares have migrated outward to the four distant corners of the board, leaving an expanse of white at the drawing's center. The sixth drawing then suddenly jolts the squares forcefully back to center, but with such velocity that they seem to collapse into one another, emitting a final flash as they careen into oblivion, as if sucked into an invisible black hole.
The drawings also evince Tuttle's signature wit. A playful lightheartedness (coupled with rigor of thought) has always been a hallmark of his art, just as have a modesty of means (though not of meaning), an overt sense of the handmade, and a certain buoyancy, as if the work might disappear at any moment. Perhaps the best example of the evanescence that lies at the heart of Tuttle's enterprise is his Wire Piece drawings, whose cast shadows are the drawing. This radical concept is present in embryonic form in Tuttle's suite of six drawings, which also threaten to disappear either beyond the borders of their support or into its very fabric. By working serially, Tuttle activates the illusory space in which the drawings exist; they function, then, kinesthetically, as much (indeed more) about movement as about form or mark-making. This blurring of the acts of looking and moving is, ultimately, what much of Tuttle's work is about, and the suite of six untitled drawings may represent his earliest fully mature drawing. Tuttle's easy movement from two to three dimensions, his interest in sculpture and drawing, and their cross-play (the cubes are, after all, composed of paper, are of modest size, and are handmade) is typical of the artist's versatility and his rejection of restrictive categories.
Kevin Salatino, Curator of Prints and Drawings - April, 2009)
