Pep Carrio from Palma de Mallocraca’s sketchbooks were shared and the insight into the artists mind is refreshing. The chance to look inside a sketchbook is always exciting with the rush of raw and unedited designs and ideas. There is something invigorating about looking at the pages that were once tauntingly blank filled up with the black washes of ink and the haunting patterns of red.
He explores many ideas with simple designs and strokes.Where it is the drawing of a fingertip pierced by the red inverted star with a ghostly image of a demon like figure in the background is striking and also interesting. The demon figure, is it on the page in a light translucentness or is it on the other side of the page and simply showing through.
He then bounces to geometric and strictly patterned pieces of arrows and lines all inter playing and relating to another. There is a strange type of futility to the pages of arrows and the jumble, a confusion that searches out for meaning and purpose but is ultimately doomed to bounce around in futility.
Others show the strange silhouettes of figures spewing white bubbles and a skull with a mask of a face sitting alone on the page. The babbling of mouths and the silentness of death and loneliness juxtaposed in a strange dance that would not have been found in finished pieces.
The next set is a caffe of coffee pouring out black ink, filling up the page with the inky foul substance as it swallows up the timelines printed on the planner’s pages. Is it a commentary on the waste of caffeine and time that is put into the day or a simple coincidence?
There is an unending barrage of images that have little environment to give them context or deeper meanings, each sketch taken with its own unrooted beauty and disturbing imagery. The push and pull of the images on apposing pages creates a dynamic that is often disturbing as the mind tries to read them as a sequence of events but is forced to take them one at a time. The beauty of a sketchbook is unveiled here, the ability to draw and let flow the slue of ideas that need no explanation but can burst forth unfettered and raw for later editing into final works.