THE DRAWER N 24 - UNDER 25

How is drawing doing in art schools today? What What does it look like? How do students draw? With what tools? What aims? What world(s) do they draw? These are the questions that The Drawer vol.24 has chosen and attempted to answer by bringing together the work of a thirty final year students, with rare exceptions, in French and international art schools – mainly those with which The Drawer has had the opportunity to build relationships with since its creation in 2011, most often through their teaching artists. Assuming its empirical character, this volume does not claim to be exhaustive. The schools who are absent, because they were not contacted, did not give following our call or because their students were not selected, may appear in a future edition. The ambition is to make it a annual and anticipated meeting, dedicated to the most contemporary practices of drawing and their representatives about to graduate. This volume is a preview, a fragmentary capture. Each of the students presented was selected by The Drawer on file for the richness and vitality of its drawing and was given a place in the magazine, which varies depending on the nature works and the desired rhythm of the work. The pleasure of discovering the works presented, their quality, was the first lesson and the first surprise of this edition. The drawing is doing well and the sheets of the designers of under 25 have nothing to envy those of their elders. Second teaching: the digital revolution does not seem to have taken place in all art schools. The use and place of new technologies in contemporary graphic practices are surprisingly small, not concerning only a tiny fraction of the sample of files received. The pencil has the skin hard. Third lesson: the predominant place of the intimate and the collective in the published achievements and the discourse that their authors produce on them. Largely autobiographical, the drawings of the young artists appear as attempts to weave links between themselves and the world, giving their personal story a collective and healing scope, conjurer of the misfortunes and violence of the time. The result is solid, sensitive, funny, touching. Drawing as a space for healing, for putting into practice distance and transformation of the world for the younger generation.