PARIS.- Obsessed with drawing, Giacometti never ceased, throughout his life, to engage hand and gaze in his attempt at capturing the elusive reality of beings and things. From his training years to the mature works, drawing occupied a central and daily place: whether he worked with a model, copied the old masters or drew from memory, he constantly went back to that fundamental practice. “What needs to be said, what I believe is that, whether it concerns sculpture or painting, only drawing counts,” he wrote.

Trained at a young age in the studio of his father Giovanni Giacometti, a post-impressionist painter, Alberto Giacometti learned to observe and convey reality with a stroke. In his sketchbooks dating from his student days in Geneva, at La Grande Chaumière with Antoine Bourdelle, then, after the Second World War, in the cafés of Montparnasse or in the studio of rue Hippolyte-Maindron, he drew relentlessly: objects, faces, passers-by, fragments of the world. Drawing is where the most acute tension between the visible and the gaze, between the being and its appearance, between presence and distance takes place.

Each stroke, each hatching, each rework, expresses the gap between what the eye perceives and what the hand tries to capture. The paper becomes a field of forces in which the lines pursue one another, are superimposed, disappear. Drawing is no longer the representation of a subject but the trace of a gaze at work. The figure, often re-centred on the sheet, seems to fight against the immensity of the emptiness. The line trembles, reappears, encircles without ever enclosing; the subject is not defined by the contours but by a network of concentric lines that make the space vibrate around it.

On the sheets dating from the 1950s and 1960s, the figure seems to have been sculpted on paper: the features are hollowed, the lead becomes matter, the eraser is used as a tool for modelling. In those drawings, we experience the tension of the penknife on the plaster, the vibration of the finger that presses on the clay. The surface of the paper becomes a mental relief, a space where the eye constantly moves forwards and backwards.

If there exists, in Giacometti’s work, an absolute continuity between drawing, painting and sculpture, it is because he approaches each medium as a variation on the same perceptive experience. Drawing is not a parallel or preparatory exercise: it is the beating heart of the work.

— Christian Alandete