Abklatsch van de krijttekening op blad 3 verso c. 1886 - 1934

This offset of a chalk drawing on page three verso by Isaac Israels is like a ghost image. It’s all about the process of making, the residue left behind. Look closely and you can just make out the forms, the shapes, the composition, there's a figure on the left and a more heavily smudged area on the right. It's so faint, so ephemeral; Israels captured a moment, an idea, and then, like a breath on a cold window, it almost disappeared. The texture of the paper becomes so important here, it’s what’s left, it becomes the thing. It reminds me of Cy Twombly, his scribbles, his erasures, that dance between presence and absence, or maybe even more directly like Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, where the act of removing becomes the art itself. It makes you think about what we choose to preserve, what we let fade away, and whether the act of creation is ever really finished.