A few loose sheets: Francesca Torzo on sketching

In these last months, fortunate to be healthy and to have had the chance to continue working, I have enjoyed an unchained time in between the quietness of the drawing table and the wilderness of my tiny garden.

I rarely touched my notebook.

Hither and thither, loose sheets of paper.

Paysage Ouvert

blue pen drawings, yellow paper 120 g, 21 x 29 cm

A very dear friend invited me, incautiously, as I see myself as a technician, to contribute to an artist residency that reflects on the meaning and experience of landscape. Paysage ouvert.

Huang Gongwang, in the midst of XIV century, portrayed landscapes in handscrolls six meters long and more, tracing with monochrome ink – in rich gradations from dry to moist – mountains and rivers, sceneries which exist only in the mind, as the panorama depicts a continuity of memory in fragments from a walk. These sketches of ideas are not realistic, but truthful.

Landscape experience seems to live in the unpredictable rapid shift of perception of different scales, where vastness is revealed by the detail – may it be a sound of tangled leaves or a stone step or a sudden shimmer. Perceiving seems to need distraction, an inexpressible – rapid and continuous – movement of conscience among elapsing observations collected by our senses, that our mind recomposes into other pictures and ideas.

The blue pen drawings sketch these lapses, memories of shadows’ silhouettes gathered along walks.

They are notes for a private house overlooking a lake and they hint the movement among the domestic spaces.

Hezhou

watercolours, white cotton paper 180 g, 10 x 10 cm

Last December I visited some abandoned factories in Hezhou, located in the Southern inland of China, as a site survey preliminary to an elementary school architecture assignment.

The beautiful concrete structures, silent in the absence of human activities, were conquered by roots of climbing plants, branches of sumptuous trees and vivid grass carpets, while tapestries of shadows of both the filigreed prefab concrete industrial screens and of trees’ leaves alternated and entwined, building an experience of spatial fluidity and ambiguity between interior and exterior.

The architectural proposal for the school begins from building a continuity with the character – or the cultural expression of the existing – living – archaeology.

The watercolours are a search for spatial relations, in which plans sections and views merge in one apparently abstract image, that may distil the experience of what is there and rephrase it into something different. These notes on spatial relations do not focus on preconceived ratios nor figures nor icons: form is yet to come, as it depends on the negotiation of innumerable variables.

Nevertheless, the building is all here: staggering beams of concrete on concrete pillars and walls ordered on a gently steep topography, sequencing rooms and gardens and more, over rooms and gardens.

Tenda

pencil drawings, white cotton paper 180 g and transparent paper 40 g, 42 x 29 cm

In the beginning of the year I was invited to contribute with an installation on the theme ‘Time in stone. Beyond the surface’ at the stone fair Marmomac in Verona.

I wished to propose a space, not a sculpture, as that is the field of my competence, and I wished to use stone as a building material.

The stone tent is a stereotomic construction of stone blocks, without the aid of metal constructions neither mortar, hosting a sculpture of a dancing figure. It may find home in an indoor setting as well as in a courtyard either a garden.

The reflection on stereotomy started drawing the stone blocks one by one, then the base chain blocks and the floor, the lintels and the threshold columns, last the stone crown.

Drawing as building, step by step.

The pencil drawings are obsessive, and sharp.

They gauge the weight of the blocks, they gauge the ease of hands.