The Brooklyn Rail

Surviving Logic, on view at a83 Gallery, introduces the work of architecture scholar Mark West in an impressive survey of his drawings, collage-drawing, and paintings. Retired from a long teaching career, West has settled in Montreal where he devotes all his energy to drawing. For West it has always been nulla dies sine linea. A traditionally trained architect, his drawings are anything but anonymous technical studies, rather recording a highly personal and dazzling exploration of perception, space, and architecture.

West’s work can be situated among a group of “Drawing Architects,” an informal grouping consisting of practitioners such as Perry Kulper, Michael Webb, Michael Young, and Mark Dorrian, whose work sets out to challenge the 2D representational conventions instilled in architecture schools in the past by generating new visual languages and materials for representing space and the built environment. Architecture collectives of the sixties and seventies such as Archigram, Ziggurat, the publication Controspazio, and Superstudio, and SITE, who were protesting modern urban design and traditional notions of architectural representation by poking fun at the status quo with their absurdist proposals and their own pop-culture utopias. The informal group of Drawing Architects in which West now participates differs in tone and purpose from those early radical collaborations. This international group has been meeting for four years to discuss their projects and to examine the notions that drive their explorations. Their conversations at Drawing Matter in Britain were recorded, and the highly diverse work was exhibited at a83 in 2023. Within the group, West's experimentations offer one personal concept of what architectural drawing, or simply what drawing, can be.

The exhibition is divided into two sections. The larger front space is devoted to graphite and charcoal drawings made during the first twenty years of West’s career. In his early work West deploys conventional drawing techniques with a surrealist sensibility to produce implausible yet convincing images of unknown places populated by strange beings and/or unidentifiable objects. Among them are chiaroscuro renderings that resonate with a sensuality reminiscent of black-and-white photographs of classical sculpture in art history texts, such as Diana’s Robes (1995). Others describe enigmatic sites in a gray world: Underwater Façade (1996), an example of these improbable settings, is defined by a gray plane recalling a stage set in an old black-and-white sci-fi movie. String-like forms float around this phantasmagorical world, providing an ambiguous sense of scale and provoking questions of function. One can detect traces of Max Ernst’s playful collages and Yves Tanguy’s dream-like landscapes. In several drawings, somber immobile figures appropriated from Edward Hopper paintings have migrated into unlikely spaces. Several of the drawings radiate the sensitively detailed drawings of Walter Pichler and the elegance of Michael Webb’s graphic projects.

Wounded God (1988), a large drawing which dominates the gallery’s front space, marks a shift in style and an expansion of materials. West deploys a medium of wax and charcoal, augmenting the contrast and radically fracturing his forms. Perhaps influenced by Roberto Matta’s energetic paintings, it is as if an enormous structure consisting of industrial bits and pieces is in process of exploding and shattering into complex fragments on a checkerboard never to be reassembled, and the “God” of the title never to recover.

In Theatre (1996), an apparent softness belies actual substance, which is cement. The piece utilizes West’s concrete casting process of using flexible molds made with fabric sheets. This transforms the concrete from a rigid into a sensual material, alive to its original wetness and plasticity. West explains how this process was triggered by his interest in sailing as well as his training in structural technology.

In the recent work in the exhibition, West begins by collaging fragments of photographs, often blurred, then superimposed over each other to suggest transparency. West begins to black out areas to remove anything immediately identifiable. The images become increasingly complex as he excavates forms from within to discover unexpected relationships among the parts. His method results in an image which is neither abstract nor literal representation. Patricia C. Phillips, in her review of his exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Artforum (1992) writes: “Drawing became an exercise in illumination through blinding blackness, a singular process of excavation.”

Certain works can be understood as aerial views: Tangled City (2018) conjures an urban transportation system worthy of the film Brazil (1985). The most recent pieces contain a new element in his method, as in STUFFIES – I WANT THEM ALL (2018): painted brush strokes wander freely around the surface of the already intricate collage. Viewed close up, we see that these marks are the only real elements. They function like noise in an early Cubist painting: from a distance the strokes merge with the brightly colored photographic elements to create a baffling new whole. West’s experimentation with collage as a modus operandi offers a stunning example of what architectural drawing can contribute to our sense of perception, or as Alexander Perrig writes in his book on Michelangelo’s drawings: “drawing is not a bone displayed for veneration. It embodies a piece of the imaginative world of its creator.”