The Brooklyn Rail

A gallery that hands magnifiers to viewers must be anticipating the question, “What is it?” From a customary viewing distance, the images that Ewan Gibbs presents, composed of marks of graphite and ink as well as pricks of a pin, are easy enough to decipher—as images. They represent views of familiar New York City landmarks, contour maps of Texas, and station codes from Texas Amtrak. The New York content is projected in illusionistic depth (as in a photograph), while the Texas content appears in the flat (as on an informational map or sign).

Why the need to move closer with a magnifying device? Though Gibbs’s images require little interpretive effort and yield to recognition, their appearance is unsettling—not quite consistent with their sources in photographs, maps, and signs. They’re unlike photographs because they retain surface irregularities foreign to filtering a scene through a lens; they’re unlike maps or signs because the tracing of contours and characters results from the controlled spacing of discontinuous elements (points, pinpricks) rather than from the direct application of a line or a shape. In the Amtrak-derived Houston, TX (2024), Gibbs represents a flat area of uniform tone with fine graphite points, the most time-consuming method to achieve the seemingly direct effect. A substantial measure of time invested by a human hand grants aura to the presentation of an image that would otherwise lack it. But what is aura worth today? And should we need a magnifier to perceive it?

Perhaps each of Gibbs’s drawings expresses in some way the aesthetic freedom of a second-order image, that is, a mimetic representation, by selective means, of a photograph, a map, or a sign. In contrast, when Rackstraw Downes draws a scene at a site, the image is first-order, whether the result connotes photography or not. In its capacity as second-order, Gibbs’s art has numerous antecedents within the Western tradition, from a map on a wall depicted by Johannes Vermeer to the trompe-l’oeil exercises of John F. Peto and Jasper Johns, not to mention the photorealist and Pop representations of a generation or two ago. Yet with all their art-historical lineage and everyday-life ordinariness, Gibbs’s images remain strange. You’re likely to sense their peculiarity immediately, however much they might seem to slot into existing categories. Hence, the nagging question, “What actually is this?”

Many of Gibbs’s new works are small, yet remarkably densely rendered, as if their degree of resolution had been bumped up to rival the best available computers or cameras. Today’s electronically composed imagery is digital, structured by a superfine raster, whereas Gibbs works in a pseudo-digital manner, risking analog irregularity with movements of a hand that continually tests itself as well as the marking range of its pencils, pens, and pins. Gibbs divides his surface into grid units (the digital factor) but applies this graphic order as a guide rather than a rule. The capacity for photographic resolution in a digital camera is a known quantity; it has a limit. Gibbs’s capacity for graphic resolution is unknown until he completes a drawing—each a novel experiment in rendering.

Gibbs’s newest New York views, such as Central Park (2024), measure 3 1/2 by 4 3/4 inches. They strike a gallery viewer as small; a standard postcard is appreciably larger. The drawings evoke reproductive photoprints in half-tone gray, like illustrations in a newspaper or a brochure. Magnification reveals a grid of pinpricks that appears to guide an irregular infilling by points of contrast, grades of tone against the white of the paper support. Years ago, Gibbs used commercial graph paper as his gridded surface; then he used a sharp, hard pencil to create a finer grid by hand, and finally he resorted to scoring a grid into his paper so that it introduced no conflicting tonal presence of its own. Spaced pinpricks, tiny punctures, now replace the scored lines.

Most of the works in the exhibition have grid units of about five millimeters, but at times Gibbs’s units have been as small as one millimeter square or as large as one centimeter square. He has resorted to a variety of pseudo-digital bits to fill his gridded pixels: diagonal strokes, crosses, X’s, and O’s. In New York (2019), a view of the Met Life Building, each square of the grid contains twelve tiny O’s, with each of these “digits” a bit different in quality from its neighbors. Each mark, irregular at this scale, must compensate for the previous marks, averaging out all the deviations from geometric regularity (like an electronic digital system striving for a level of resolution beyond the capacity of its number of pixels). A later version of the same image, smaller in size, New York (2022), has a grid of pinpricks that mark only the implied intersections of absent lines and each unit’s center point—a minimal guide for the application of traces of graphite that combine to generate a representation. Here Gibbs distinguishes each point of his pencil from the previous one, playing the game of articulating and averaging-out that he played with O’s in the larger version of this photographic scene.

I resist calling Gibbs’s points of tone “dots,” because the word connotes a circular form however small; “points” made by a pencil have the near-null dimensions of the sharpened point itself; like elements of emulsion in analog photography, they have no specific Euclidean shape. But smaller still are the pinpricks, sometimes used in quantity to register a value of tone lighter than the marks of the hardest graphite. A pinprick creates a slight indentation in the paper surface, which reveals its whiteness but at an angle that catches both light and shadow—hence, a tonal value lighter than any other mark but still darker than the given paper. With pinpricks, Gibbs also “draws” the contour of the state of Texas; in Austin, TX (2025), a single pinprick within the contour marks the location of that city. For his maps, Gibbs even distinguishes between pinpricks that penetrate from the front of the paper and those that penetrate from the back—two different effects of “tone.”

In halftone printing, the individual points of ink remain below the threshold of vision at a normal viewing distance, and each has the same tonal value; their distribution, the ratio of inked to virgin ground in any given grid unit, determines the articulation of the lens-inflected image. Gibbs’s marking is far more complicated; his points vary in value according to the grade of pencil (hard to soft), the pressure applied, and the relative sharpness of the point, not to mention the effect of the pinpricks wherever used. And one graphite point can be superimposed upon another. As I’ve already implied, Gibbs uses a digital method with an analog sensibility, achieving analog results.

But isn’t the aim of photographic printing to do just this, to produce (the effect of) a seamless analog image under normal viewing conditions, whether photomechanically with emulsion or photoelectrically with pixels? Yes, but as I’ve said, Gibbs’s result doesn’t look like a photograph. As I lingered over the works in the exhibition, I began to think that I understood why. Photographic prints give the appearance of being uniformly flat, even though dematerialized filmic imagery projects flatter, and video images project flatter still. With gross magnification, a video image can suggest layered materiality because the differentiated tones seem to pull away from each other—one nearer, one farther—like dark gray pulling away from light gray, or—in full chroma—red pulling away from green. Hand renderings, by comparison with photomechanical and photoelectric imagery, have material depth at any focal scale, however slight the differentials may be.

At the exhibition, I began to fantasize that—without relying on perspective or atmospheric illusion—Gibbs had created images in three dimensions. I think that this wasn’t mere fantasy. His materials themselves are arrayed in physical layers, ink in front of pencil, and pencil in front of paper, and paper in front of pinpricks. Yes, something analogous might be true of all hand-drawn works on paper. But Gibbs’s art, because he capitalizes on the tension built into second-order images (Is it or isn’t it photographic?), compels a viewer to reflect on their own perception. Here, in a medium classified as design in two dimensions, the image leads to a recognition of material depth (third dimension) and its associated lapse of time (fourth dimension): the antithesis of photographic instantaneity.

The quantity of graphite in Gibbs’s drawings indicates the degree of darkness at such a fine level of discrimination that tonal value corresponds to material thickness, measured in units that ought not register to naked sense but somehow do. This art is self-magnifying. When Gibbs adds points of ink to pencil, the ink is not only darker but materially thicker and heavier; in Central Park, the ink “feels” as if it belonged to a second raster laid over a first raster of gridded pencil. The “feeling” is at once visual and tactile, as if one discernible layer might be lifted off the other. Accept the conceptual paradox or not: Gibbs has been making illusionistic flat images in actual (not illusory) three and four dimensions. You see it, you sense it, no magnification needed.