Icarus 2003

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this Icarus with ink on paper, and what strikes me is how he uses a kind of pared-down mark-making to conjure up a really complex narrative. The lines are so direct, so immediate, you can almost see the artist's hand moving across the page, deciding where to add weight, where to let the ink bleed a little. Look at the way the sun, or is it a trap, is built from these broken arcs and sharp rays, and how they contrast with the more flowing lines of Icarus's body and wings. It's like Krupa is saying something about the push and pull between freedom and destruction. The inky drips feel less like mistakes and more like echoes of the myth itself, the melting wax and the inevitable fall. It reminds me a little of some of Matisse's line drawings, that same sense of capturing the essence of a form with the fewest possible strokes, of making something grand out of something so simple. It's a reminder that art is as much about what you leave out as what you put in, about the stories we tell ourselves in the spaces between the lines.