Mémoires d'un électron 2003

Jorge Martins made "Memories of an Electron" with what looks like graphite on paper, and the whole thing feels like a dance of intuition. Look closely, and you’ll see how line becomes form, how the lightest touch can suggest the weight of memory. The large, stacked swirl in the top-center is particularly striking. It is both a chaotic mass and a carefully constructed form. Its darkness draws your eye, but it's the delicate quality of the mark-making that really holds it. The rest of the drawing is made up of wispy lines, and smudged or blurred shapes that float and hover around the page like electrons in orbit. This piece reminds me a little of Agnes Martin’s drawings, in how both artists achieve such a sense of space and light with such simple means. There’s a sense of openness here, a feeling that the drawing is less about what it depicts than about the experience of seeing itself. It is about how the act of artmaking can reveal new ways of thinking.