I was thrilled to see the work of 20×200 artist Jorge Colombo in the Summer Reading show here at JBG.  His series of Subway Readers is a collection of sketches of various people reading while riding the subway. Each sketch marks the illustrator as a wanderer, an onlooker, and a traveler. They are quiet moments sketched as if journal entries from a curious and hungry eye.

For the length of time the subject sits reading in his sight line, Colombo is either able to sketch the fullness of the surrounding scene or merely the subject sitting, hanging in air. This gives us, as viewers, a sense of time. Looking at these, I wonder if Colombo sketches until his subject reaches their destination or until he reaches his own destination. More questions begin to arise: Are they even done in the moment? Are they memories? Does he capture them with his iPhone?

As João Paulo Cotrim writes of Colombo, “The richness of his details and the exactitude of his line work help our eyes to find a photographic peace, but it’s a fake fidelity.” I like thinking of this idea of a “fake fidelity” as an implied depiction of realism from the “sentiment of [the] author.”  There is an obvious sense of intent with every pen stroke, a need to show something―but what?

Whatever that something may be, Colombo finds a way to take these particular moments and make them about solitude and imagination.  The reader portrayed becomes a character of fiction, full of mystery, full of life, yet entirely undisturbed and unaware of an onlooker’s artistic hand.  What we take away from each sketch is the interpretation of the moment, inferred ”easily from bodies and faces: they’re as far from caricature as they are from portrait. Jorge Colombo’s pen interprets; it doesn’t reproduce. And it’s through this door that mystery enters.”

See the entire Summer Reading show online or in the gallery until August 22.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 3:58 pm by Nick Feder and is filed under artists, at jen bekman, exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.