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IN HIS poetic primer ‘The Pedagogical Sketchbook’, Paul Klee describes the act of
drawing as akin to taking a line on a walk; a walk without goal, a walk for walks
sake
. And so the drawings of Stephen Dunne begin, from the arc of stroke or the
trajectory of a splash of ink. Without visual source material the images grow, as a
semi-automatic uncluttering of the artists subconscious: febrile images and psychotic
cartoons. The iconography of Dunne's drawings and paintings veer, with no
discernable effort, from the ephemera of extreme music to religious icons to surgical
nightmares. This approach emerges from a Guston like epiphany that the artist can
paint the chaotic nature of the world rather than denying it.
What he exposes is the mark bound by the collective unconscious... The Magus and
artist Austin Osman Spare describes his own idiosyncratic system of mark making
and automatic drawing, as a means of guiding and uniting the partially free belief
and further into his rambles, Klee's passage of the line becomes a projection of
energy and finally a symbol of will and infinity
. The act of drawing becomes a
means of transcendence. The fact that Dunne's drawing holds a (muddy) mirror to our
Rorschach blot-like need to locate psychosis and shade in the arbitrary shows how far
we are from a state of shared grace. However as he continually points out there is not
only a great pleasure and humour to be found whilst picking at this particular scab but
it also reminds us that this knot of compromise and angst is what makes us all human.
Mark Titchner, Pilot Catalogue, 2007.
