Derviz almost exclusively employs charcoal to make these drawings. It is among the most pictorial of drawing mediums, enabling a sheer variety of effects—ranging from precise lines to atmospheric fields—depending on the pressure applied onto the paper. Charcoal possesses both the acute delicacy of fine mechanical pencils and the painterly beauty characteristic of the ways oil paint bleeds. Charcoal demands a heightened physical engagement with the act of drawing, which often continues after the stick is set aside. The marks it leaves beg to be spread with a finger.
Derviz embraces charcoal’s corporeal dimensions and conceives of drawing almost as a recording instrument. The seemingly finished works bear the imprint of her hands’ movements across the surface, set in motion by the motifs she captures. Her drawings embody empathic networks of intuition and feeling fostered by her being in the world. Beneath the recognisable elements she renders—branches, foliage, trunks—her drawings’ fundamental subjects emerge, manifesting the interstices that escape fixed forms. Derviz uses her free and thinking hands to open the visible world, metamorphosing matter into transfigured forms, to paraphrase the French art historian Henri Focillon’s In Praise of Hands.
The four paintings Derviz presents in this exhibition translate into painting the meditative rigour of her draughtsmanship. Throughout their making, she returns repeatedly to charcoal even while working in oil, using it to find her bearings and maintain sound compositions. It is as though she incrementally transfers charcoal from paper to linen, from drawing to painting. Each layer brings her closer to the works we see now. Her constructive method reads as deconstructive: the paintings collapse the appearance of her drawings through their own pictorial means. Within the boundaries of each canvas, her charcoal additions, now buried under layers of oil paint, remain faintly visible. They activate the vibrations of Derviz’s hand-driven memories. Her movements subtly resurface through them. If her drawings gently perspire with these remembrances, it is with paint that she fully embraces them.
The paintings give form to the drawings’ roots. Derviz’s aesthetic attitude yields a pictorial realm where forms are revealed through their essence, where outlines no longer serve as primary definitions and contours become irrelevant. Her paintings daze us into a perceptual state where the world has not
yet solidified into photographic legibility, a metaphor echoed in the title of one of her works, The sun turning into water. As Kazimir Malevich writes in a text Derviz often returns to, ‘An Analysis of New and Imitative Art’, she ‘mak[es] [us] experience the reality of [her paintings] at [their] given moment [in time]’. By creating unbound forms, Derviz imbues painting itself with living perception.
—Théo de Luca
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards