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Antonio Trecel Diaz is a New York based artist whose drawings depict images of death, violence and dismemberment. Diaz creates symbolic systems that screen the traumatic, renderings of figures slipping beyond recognition. In Diaz’s economy the body is always a body in distress, torn apart by malfunctioning tools, impossible longings, charts and representations. Drawing becomes the expression of loss, lack and failure that doubles itself through the malformed subject matter: humans and animals in states of ambiguity, amputated and dissected; forms manipulated by external forces: severed bodies, incomplete lines and marks that all end in the creation of something other. Drawing as desire, as a form of archaic magic where there are no ideals, figures or objects, only moments of immanent assemblages pieced together, pushing themselves towards the horizon of the visible. The content of Diaz’s work exist somewhere between its subject and the marking, the mark being foundational and the subject being secondary in that it is an armature which is quickly effaced and only surfaces as effacement. Disappearance takes on the quality of a residual build up on the surface of the paper, which always points towards the limits of representation, the limits of perception. This is the trace that is so essential to drawing: the shadow cast by communication.