The exploration of limits by Thi Chi N’Guyen
March 2011
T.: How would you describe your work?
I.M.: I have a practice based on drawing. In my work, image and text meet and find themselves on an equal level. So, for me, there’s no hierarchy between drawing words from literary sources or images from photographic sources. The encounter between word and image creates a particular atmosphere or emotion, or more precisely a narrative. Each plate is presented as an extract from a potential story. Viewers are invited to invent their own scenario and combine the pieces of narration on offer with their own stories.
T: How do you begin a drawing or a series?
I.M.: I always start with a simple line drawing in pencil. I try to simplify and to reduce, in order to push the drawing towards a certain obviousness. The process has rules: no erasing, no going back over a pencil stroke, no correction, a method by which the drawing seems to have been produced “in a single stroke”. In some drawings, an isolated stroke may seem crude, but on the whole, the deformation seems to dissolve, to disappear. I like exploring these limits. By now I must have a collection of thousands of drawings, all produced in an identical format. It’s the basis I draw from and feed on a daily basis. Then there’s a process of selection and association and then a transfer to other supports and media which each have different characteristics: ink, printing, digital techniques or colour pencil. This transfer work helps me explore the exhibiting of the drawing, the relationship the drawing has to space and time and the way it’s received and perceived by the viewer …
T. : What are your sources of inspiration?
I.M.: There are many sources of inspiration. They intervene directly in my work, in the form of quotations, diversions and appropriations. They are basically photographic, literary or cinematic. Of course, there are favourite authors, but in general, the cinema as a language, as well as its particular relationship with time and its way of constructing a story, influences me.
T.: Drawing and practicing a very simple and sober art form, is that a statement in itself?
I.M.: Yes, it’s above all a simple and mobile form of art, which doesn’t require a lot of equipment or space. It’s also close to writing. There’s first and foremost a relationship with time, which is communicated to the viewer. There’s a certain tension between the initial spontaneous pencil drawing of a figure and its painstaking elaboration in colour pencil, with a very slow technique of superimposing layers, in an almost meditative way. A sort of “slowing down” that I hope enters into the drawing.