Oiseaux

Oiseaux is a book of nearly 200 drawings made by Jochen Gerner between February 2019 and September 2020. Each of these birds was drawn with pigmented Indian ink markers on small format school notebooks from China and India, on which appear lines and squares of different sizes.

This series of drawings constitutes a graphic experimentation aiming at exploring the potentialities of the weft, the superposition of the lines, and the association of a reduced number of colors in the creation of the feathers. By mixing dreamed and real birds, this inventory questions the links between imagination and reality in our daily life, and teaches us that the fantastic is most often nestled in the reality of everyday life.

In this graphic research, Jochen Gerner was inspired by the work of certain 18th century illustrators such as François-Nicolas Martinet, who used to represent birds in profile, thus giving them a noble and stiff character, contrasting with the strength and brightness of the colors.