For the artist Samuli Blatter (b. 1986) graphite is much more than a drawing material. It is his most important tool. In the Aargauer Kunsthaus he is transforming one of the collection rooms on the top floor into an overflowing, collaged Gesamtkunstwerk. Pencil drawings of various sizes and in different styles are overlaid with one another, and existing groups of works are combined with new pieces.

From the dense line with the metallic gleam to the random blur – the works of the Lucerne-based artist Samuli Blatter (b. 1986) are characterised entirely by graphite. The artist puts his compositions on paper with a deliberate, powerful line; they recall geometrical constructions of stripes, calligraphy or crystal structures. Each drawing is unique, although the artist works in series that follow certain fundamental technical decisions. At a furious pace, sometimes free from the wrist, sometimes drawn strictly along a set square, lines are laid side by side and crossing one another. Dark strokes condense into organically growing planes that spread like nets over the large-format sheets of paper.

Graphite also plays an important part in Blatter’s sculptural and space-occupying works: for example the artist combines beeswax and graphite dust into a modelling material, from which he makes small objects and parts for his spatial interventions. Contrary to the lightness and elasticity of the material, the objects, with their dark, shimmering patina, recall massive iron sculptures and, like the drawings, demand to be looked at carefully. Art historian Isabel Zürcher eloquently summed up Blatter’s drawings when she applied the term ‘extremely precise imprecision’ to them. The signs and structures remain cryptic, but they resemble journeys or geological finds that the artist has patiently laboured to peel from their surrounding material.

For the CARAVAN exhibition in the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Blatter makes a kind of collage space in which older works are combined with new ones: large-format drawings from the Prozessor series serve as support material for new pencil drawings. While the background drawings show strict, dark constructions of stripes, the new works surprise with their strikingly free line. Overlaid scraps of drawings, as well as traces of wax and wood glue, open up the transition from drawing to sculpture. In this way the idea of the drawing as trace or sign on a surface becomes extended and legible in a sculptural sense. Blatter’s declared intention, to create drawings that work as abstract signs on the picture plane and at the same time take their tangible materiality as their own subject, is thus fulfilled.

Blatter’s deliberate treatment of his own work is reflected in this piece. In the same way as the traces of graphite are deposited and sedimented in his own works, the artist develops his work: layer by layer. Nothing is ever erased, a work is never entirely finished. Often drawings are continued to a later point in time, overdrawn or transformed and, as in his treatment of the sculptures and installations, reused as material for later works.