Dr. Larka (Revision)

The Drawing Center's hard wood flooring and central Romanesque columns create a room that feels much more monumental then is possible for Wooster Street. However, this elegant space properly pays homage to primitive art techniques that unite all creators of art's past. This meditative center lowers your voice and dilates your pupils to best observe of the delicate work of pencil and ink on paper.

The Drawing Center is the ideal place for Mexican artist Dr. Larka to debut his raw, instinctual work to New York. The series of drawings on paper explores the inter-stirrings of humanity’s primal urges, which are often censored to secure the social/ moral order impressed into our existence. The artist manifests these impulses as ink drawings similar in style to traditional tattooing and early cartooning. Unambiguous and legible, the seemingly preliminary work is assisted by the medium allowing it to hang as a complete thought. Viewers receive enough pictorial information and understand the fine characteristics of the medium utilized. The artists' ability to acutely monitor the weight, length and width of line with ink is challenged by the medium’s unforgiving, permanent nature. Dr. Larka's imagery shows premeditated ideas that he willingly allows the medium to manipulate. His trusting use of black ink and white paper allow for a visually translated, unedited stream of consciousness for the viewer to pore over. Each drawn object offering itself as a piece of another object makes these compositions puzzling, however, the final map of Dr. Larka’s channeled impulses offers the viewer art to identify and sympathize with. “Sketch 6”, specifically conspicuous because of the wide exposing mouth and breasts that are deserving of a permanent place on any sailor’s body, when closely observed reveals a spectrum of emotions that are gently drawn but are the product of an deeply mindful artist. The work is held in balance by the duality of a soft, minimalistic medium and an emotionally saturated subject matter.

When visiting the Drawing Center and observing the visual expressions of artist, Dr. Larka, it is important to digest the experience slowly and fully. What might appear as incomplete and expired is in fact loaded with poetic brushwork and steaming with an inner dialogue that boils within us all.