Birds

Birds is an aviary bringing together nearly 200 drawings made by Jochen Gerner between February 2019 and September 2020. Each of these birds was drawn with pigmented Indian ink felt-tip pen on small-format school notebooks, originating from China and India, on which lines and squares appear of different sizes. This series of drawings constitutes an experiment graphic aiming to explore the potentialities of the frame, the superposition of features, and the association of a reduced number of colors in the creation of plumages. By mixing dreamed and real birds, this inventory questions the links between imagination and reality in our daily life, and teaches us that the fantastic is most often nestled in the reality of everyday life. In the context From this graphic research, Jochen Gerner was inspired by the work of certain 18th century illustrators such as François-Nicolas Martinet, who used to represent birds in profile, thus giving them a noble and stiff character, contrasting with the strength and luminous aspect of the colors. The work will be accompanied by an unpublished text written by the philosopher Emanuele Coccia.