The drawing machine invented by Boryana Petkova reminds us: hung very overhanging, the arm of a rudimentary but tireless mechanism sets in motion a sheet of paper, on which the artist tries to use pencil strokes, by jumping from the ground. She often succeeds, she also fails. Success, fatigue, failure and erasure: the features overflow and smear the whiteness of the chair rail, end up piercing the sheet which wears and tears, just as challenge and fatigue imperceptibly put the artist to the test. The line finds here what essentially constitutes it: the precariousness of any gesture, the entropic nature of energy, the variability of intensities, the relative mastery of techniques and processes.

Bertrand Tillier  professeur à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne