kurimanzutto presents a selection of drawings made by Jimmie Durham between 1989 and 2020 in Siembra. Enigmatic and apparently innocent or accidental, they move away from the illustrative intention of drawing as a medium in favor of a poetic exploration of drawing as a way of writing, or of writing as a drawing act, as well as the relationship between forms and concepts. The set of drawings encompass different types of gestures or operations on paper: interventions on old record sheets, texts that become scribbles, traces of objects covered in graphite thrown against a paper, abstractions on found documents, or unruly lines that pulse along a rulebook sheet for training engineering purposes. The found papers that he uses emanate temporal thickness and store stories, traces, memories or information that depend on their material support to continue existing in the world.

Drawing as a medium intrinsically implies the impossibility of imitating reality, and in that sense it represents for Durham a medium that offers an implicit freedom. Like writing, drawing has been very present throughout the artist's career. The use of discarded and found papers, such as plane tickets, accounting sheets, drafts or papers discarded during writing or artistic creation processes by the artist himself have been a constant in his work. By reusing forgotten pieces of paper that were destined to be lost or even disintegrated over time, Durham seeks to immortalize them. According to the artist, “our civilization is basically made of scraps of paper, and we have too many that were used once and then became useless thereafter, as is most of our history, or as we wish it were ”.