The True Definition of Man does not involve any consideration of the number 20

a five day public walldrawing piece, 2005

Working from an immersion in Spinoza’s Ethics, I engage myself in an intensive investigation: 5 days, during which the walldrawings will be realized. The project is a living mural; a vehicle or a vessel for the manifestation of visual thought. Each morning I sand the wall. This serves to return the surface to a “clean” state, but not to efface everything. Directly following, I draw non-stop. The process is visible to the public for most of the day; until the drawing is finished according to my proper rules. This begins again the next morning. On the last day, the wall will evidence the previous investigations with traces that resurface through the layers. They will become even more obscured by the drawing of this last day, then definitively effaced with the eventual restitution of the wall to its original state. The drawings have a short and violent life: a cycle of semiotic births and deaths as volatile as the cycle of intentions and reactions that produced them.