Birds

Available for pre-order, shipping from May 14th. Oiseaux is an aviary bringing together nearly 200 drawings made by Jochen Gerner between February 2019 and September 2020. Each of these birds was drawn in felt-tip pen in pigmented India ink on small-format school notebooks, originating from China and India , on which appear lines and squares of different sizes. This series of drawings constitutes a graphic experiment aimed at exploring the potentialities of the weft, the superposition of lines, and the association of a reduced number of colors in the creation of plumages. By mixing dreamed and real birds, this inventory questions the links between imagination and reality in our daily life, and teaches us that the fantastic is most often nested in everyday reality. As part of this graphic research, Jochen Gerner was inspired by the work of certain 18th century illustrators such as that of François-Nicolas Martinet, who used to represent birds in profile, thus giving them a noble and stiff character, contrasting with the strength and luminous appearance of the colors. Jochen Gerner, Emanuele Coccia