Eduardo Abaroa presents Other Specimen for Siembra 26 an exhibit of drawings on paper and wood that also includes smallformat sculpture made from various materials and a drawing table with materials from the artist’s archive. The action of automatic drawing during moments of spare time or while

waiting, while talking on the telephone, listening to a lecture, or waiting for an errand to be done is for Abaroa a testament to the passage of time in various moments of his life. After half a decade of making idle scribbles, in other words, without any clear intention, the artist thought he’d found something in many of them worth retrieving.

During the last three years Abaroa resolved to compile these abandoned drawings left on the corners of books, old notebooks, manila folders that had been reused for decades, on electric or phone bills, or on any other scrap of paper whose eventual destination would be the garbage. The gathering of

this material served to generate a daily drawing practice which resulted in distorted geometries, characters who dissolve and later re-appear, hundreds of repetitive and redundant graphic designs. Evidently, from these pencil strokes, a typology emerged, or a classification system having little to

do with biological taxonomy or with formal geometry. These other specimen have more to do with a thought process in action—largely involuntary—which perhaps are the first steps of decorative art, or the development of a pictorial style, or a system of writing. Some of the graphology are the product of rudimentary instructions that generate a tension between contemplation and legibility, others are sentences that have been written directly, caricatures or emoticons, species, etcetera.