IMG 6126 1986

This quiet drawing on paper is by Katsuhito Nishikawa. He's working with line here, a bare minimum, that's all it takes to conjure something like a plant, or maybe an explosion, or a memory. The lines aren’t quite dense enough to form a solid shape, it's like he's trying to create a volume without actually blocking it in. I love how delicate it is, like a ghost, and how the texture of the paper is as important as the drawing itself. It reminds me of Cy Twombly, and his urgent scribbles on huge canvases, but this is more like a whisper, a quiet but insistent presence. Art is always about this conversation, artists responding to one another across time. Nishikawa here, is conjuring the past in new and interesting ways.