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Subtly rendered graphite musings surrounded by vast areas of white paper, the drawings of David Poolman contain both an aching sweetness and a sense of foreboding.\u00a0 What I want to say \u2013 but shouldn\u2019t \u2013 is that the work is pathetic, in the most impressive of ways.\u00a0 It inspires a quiet sense of empathy, the source of which is not entirely nameable.<\/p>\n

It seems unlikely that words would fail a body of work that appears so narrative.\u00a0 There are stories here, undoubtedly, rife with metaphor.\u00a0 But despite their visual clarity, their tragicomic meaning remains opaque.\u00a0 We can recognize the main characters.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Ballad of Bento Martins\u201d a man is held aloft \u2013or is perhaps balancing \u2013 on the head of another.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a donkey \u2013 or is that a mule?\u2013 drifts off of the edge of the paper.\u00a0 The image creates a riddle of sorts, we can connect the saddle in the man\u2019s hand to the errant pack animal, but to what end?<\/p>\n

David Poolman\u2019s latest drawings seem to revel in absurd uncertainty; their open-ended narratives designed to intrigue.\u00a0 They are at times clever and caustic \u2013 nonchalant figures burdened under the weight of an oversized sausage \u2013 but never joking.\u00a0\u00a0 They beg to be read, but allow for multiple interpretations.\u00a0 In \u201cMy Better Years,\u201d the artist creates an amalgamated figure, comprised of the different ages and actions that make up a life.\u00a0 The result is a hovering, faceless chimera that is at once hopeful and melancholic.\u00a0 The compounded figure appears to be airborne, but the viewer is made fully aware of the weight of the subject.<\/p>\n

Gravity, conceptually and physically, is at play in the vertical drawing \u201cAll My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.\u201d\u00a0 Parsed along an implied line, the figures are caught mid-rotation in a free-fall descent. \u00a0\u00a0Despite the downward trajectory, their poses move towards a sense of calm acceptance. On the bottom register, the final figure is grounded by a slight shadow, almost peaceably reposed.\u00a0 \u00a0Both \u201cAll My Friends\u2026\u201d and \u201cRank Strangers\u201d read like rebuses, verbal puzzles in which we are given only visual clues.\u00a0 Whether speaking in metaphors or suggesting larger fictions, language is an important component in this work.\u00a0 Actions play out with the calm deliberation of a Samuel Beckett scene.<\/p>\n

David Poolman creates work that is specifically vague.\u00a0\u00a0 Its nuanced constructions hint at a fraught and fragile human condition.\u00a0\u00a0 In each, we are left to question gravity and gravitas. \u00a0Throughout it all, there is a current of understated foreboding.\u00a0\u00a0 The exact warning is left unclear, even when spelled out explicitly: \u2018This Will Not End Well.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Subtly rendered graphite musings surrounded by vast areas of white paper, the drawings of David Poolman contain both an aching sweetness and a sense of foreboding.\u00a0 What I want to say \u2013 but shouldn\u2019t \u2013 is that the work is pathetic, in the most impressive of ways.\u00a0 It inspires a quiet sense of empathy, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1919"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}