Residual Gravity - Diogo Pimentão

This retrospective monograph, with a dozen previously unpublished texts and a long interview with the artist, reveals the challenges of Portuguese artist Diogo Pimentão’s resolutely expanded practice of drawing, informed as much by dance as sculpture or performance.“Drawing, whatever the result, its size, meticulousness, radicalism, is done with the body. The hand is the final tool for it, of course, but its relationship to paper, composition, movement, format all involve the body. Diogo Pimentão works at the very heart of this question. For as long as I can remember, his work has called for volume. Very early on, the paper was presented freely, in its materiality, its thickness, with its folds and bends that liken it to bas-relief.” — Johana Carrier.

To open the 2020 season, Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (Frac) Normandie Rouen invited the Portuguese artist Diogo Pimentão to occupy its exhibition spaces for his first major solo exhibition in France. This richly illustrated monograph documents research of almost fifteen years on the practice of drawing that involves the artist’s own body and the space and references a history of sculpture and gesture that is simultaneously minimal, conceptual, and performative. Published on the occasion of the exhibition « Diogo Pimentão – Dessiner à rebours » at Frac Normandie Rouen, from January 25 to July 26, 2020.

Using mainly paper and graphite, at times in combination with charcoal, wood, and concrete, Diogo Pimentão (born 1973 in Lisbon.) constructs forms that complicate the categorical boundaries between drawing and sculpture.