Gouache, colored pencil, ink, charcoal, pastel, graphite, glitter glue, highlighter, correction pen, marker et ballpoint pen sur papier craft
110 × 180 cm
Dodécaphonies 1, FRAC Limousin collection, France
Dodécaphonies 2, private collection, Singapore
Dodécaphonies 3, private collection, France
Johana Carrier, Le dessin par le milieu, in Benjamin Hochart, ed. Adera, 2012
In the wake of the Conceptualists, Hochart’s lines stand out clearly, advancing into the foreground to become actual physical components. We could say, with Rosalind Krauss, that he allows them “to account as accurately as possible for the grounds of one’s own experience.” [1] Since he has also assimilated the lessons of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, these volatile, highly expressive lines disperse the work’s focal point and, aided and abetted by colour, generate a luminous atmosphere. They are at one and the same time concept, gesture, movement, emotion and narration.
The way these lines are brought into being hinges on a process the artist calls “dodecaphonic”,
in a reference to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition, which uses the twelve chromatic notes of the octave on an equal, non-repetitive basis and independently of the key system. Choosing a number of drawing instruments, Hochart allots them an order: each must be used once before any one of them can be used again. In addition he assigns a particular gesture to each – a rule which, unsurprisingly, can be broken when necessary. While providing the artist with an infinite formal repertoire, this twelve-tone method remains a constraint; but paradoxically, through the objectivisation of the process and the surrendering of the instrument to the rule, the constraint becomes a liberating factor: absolved of the need to choose between an array of pencils, markers, inks, etc., the artist can home in on the gesture and its immediacy, with a spontaneity he describes as “automatic”. Moreover, to a certain extent the tools determine the drawing. The lines are more or less fine depending on the ballpoint used, the areas of solid colour are filled in with broad markers, and there is a whole range of thicknesses in between. The possible combinations of drawing tools, forms and gestures are unlimited and endlessly renewed.
- Rosalind Krauss, Line as Language:
Six Artists Draw (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 1974), 32
