Fragments of Eternity

Passages in Ballpoint by Melissa Bianca Amore. Does memory obey observation or is it a series of recollections from another's history? Layered with overlapping histories, Toucas's personal portraits act as miniature memorial sites, revealing human vulnerability and our need to preserve intimate encounters. Rendered in ballpoint, the drawings in Fragments of Eternity are recorded moments from exchanges with iconic masterpieces, landscapes, people and psychological spaces. Presented as a successive series representing both interior and exterior worlds, these fragments of memory give the impression of entering a lucid dream or continuous stream of consciousness. What began as diaristic musings with a pen has become a meditative process. For this French artist and diplomat, a return to drawing after his early teenage years was triggered by the expansive Australian landscape. The monochrome blue-light illuminated in these drawings, known as L'heure Bleue, creates a chromatic shift from day into night and from the bodily to incorporeality. For Toucas, the ballpoint is a precision mapping apparatus and tool used to enter the layers of his personal archive and interactions with the world. Within commonplace beauty lives the monumental; inviting reconsideration of observation through the mechanics of doodling.