Louise Despont Works

Louise Despont / The Invisible Fold

Published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3

note: The published version was edited and shortened due to issues of space. Here, the text is the original full version, followed by the published.

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Louise Despont

The Invisible Fold


Columns for rates and transactions on ledger book registers become meta-grids for Louise Despont’s pencil colour drawings that are exhibited at Gallerie Isa, Mumbai, from the 10th of June to the 1st of September. Overlaying existing rules and records of the unthreaded spreads from old registers, Despont draws new grids to order her drawings. At a distance, the works seem to be guided by the symmetry of the book-fold itself. The imposing balance within the works, gently tweaked at places invite a comparison with Rorschach Inkblots that mirror their own halves. While klecksography (the art of making images with inkblots) allows a poetic exploration of the subconscious, Despont’s careful motifs refer to mythical diagrams through which the ancients imagined the structure of the universe.

The large surfaces created by joining several pages of the book come together like the tiles of a large mural. The overall scale and execution reminds you of the present day “working drawings” that architects prepare towards the final construction of a building on site. Despont’s meticulously detailed drawings alluding to iconographies of temple towers and sculptures are no less than site documents that record material, construction details, sizes, costs and project timelines.

The soft pencil drawings hide and reveal the sub-layers evoking historical and mythical connections with their substratum. A certain time-space compact collapses the spaces of architecture and economics, art and construction and makes hidden interrelationships apparent. The ways in which the abstract and concrete aspects of production take shape through the process of art making are subtly demonstrated in the works of Louise Despont.

Anuj Daga

Louise Despont. Fort. Coloured pencil and graphite on antique ledger book paper. 187 cms x 178 cms. 2017, Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Isa.

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