in: Draw #6 Thomas Müller. Edited by Nora Schattauer, Revolver Publishing, Berlin, 2012

Drawing begins when we point to something, emphasize something, distinguish it. We separate it from the rest. The mark remains in tension with the empty space of the surface: there the unmarked, unmeasured continuum of the ground, here the sign, the energy of the line that activates the ground.

Something is separated and placed in relation through touch. Lines divide, lines connect. Perhaps the best lines can do both at the same time.

By separating something and connecting something, a structure is created. Movements that oscillate between contradictory or complementary poles open up a space, the open space of the drawing, the space into which one can work. In this way, the drawing creates its own conditions (but not its goals).

Each new drawing creates what is missing, each drawing a knot that expands and stabilizes the fabric. My work grows through repetition and deviation. A constantly changing network of references emerges.

Drawing corresponds to the mobility of thoughts that spread out in different directions. Thus the corpus of my sheets grows rhizomatically in different directions at the same time, linking different, even contradictory thoughts and impulses.

In the drawing, thinking becomes physical and immediate. Hesitation is an essential part of it, the impure and the fragmentary – and the hope that things may explain each other.

Thomas Müller