“Nina Papaconstantinou is one of the artists who work exclusively with drawing as their main – primary – means of expression and rose to prominence during approximately the past decade. Since the 1960s, the ontology of drawing has been put in a post‐medium condition, as this has been proclaimed by Rosalind Kraus, which cannot be understood solely through the definition of its morphological characteristics. The 1960s and 1970s brought a radicalization of the approaches to drawing, incorporating a large number of processes, materials and techniques. In its extended conception, drawing encompassed everything from Eva Hesse’s and Agnes Martin’s works on paper to Dan Flavin’s and Sol LeWitt’s photocopied pages of Scientific American and working notes, or John Cage’s score, which were shown in 1966 in the exhibition Working Drawings And Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art, as well as the line formed by Richard Long’s footsteps in Line Made by Walking (1967). In Papaconstantinou’s drawings, the notion of the process, this highly tautological condition of “drawing”, which was associated with a number of conceptual and post‐conceptual practices, meets and intersects with narrativity, story telling and fiction.

The kernel of the works displayed in the exhibition is Library, an installation in progress that begun in 2004, including more than 40 drawings to this day. In each of these works, Papaconstantinou copies in multiple layers on blue carbon paper, word for word, an entire literary text, so that the final drawing produced is an imprint of the carbon paper on the surface of the paper. In these drawn palimpsests, the successive, repeated writings accumulate on a unified surface. The density and strength of the imprint of the carbon paper varies according to the length of the text, the size of the lettering, the origin of the alphabet, the book’s number of pages and the genre of each text. During the process of transcription the artist follows the typographic layout and organization of the printed text on the book’s page, abiding by, as the case may be, the conventions of verse or prose. A distinctive feature is the greater density of writing on the left side of the drawings based on plays, such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, or the concentration of the text only on the left side of the page in poems, such as Miltos Sachtouris’ Color Wounds, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love, or Odysseus Elytis’ Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenent of the Albanian Campaign.

Each new layer of text suddenly refutes itself during the moment of its writing, since it is abolished by the next one that will follow in a Sisyphean, laborious attempt to reproduce the text. The exacting and time‐consuming process of transcription imitates and at the same time parodies the process of text preservation, which was common in the monastic copying workshops of the Middle Ages, the so‐called “scriptoria”. The text as a mnemotechnic tool, which fulfils the mnemonic function of writing, gives its place to an accumulation of signs, symbols and traces, the remains of a bodily process, of the physical activity of writing. In the process, the bend, the movement, the direction in which a letter is drawn, the so‐called “ductus”, which has been analyzed in palaeography, exposes the hand’s trajectory and the decisive participation of the body.

The prolific body of texts in the library – which includes works by authors from M. Karagatsis, Dylan Thomas and Antonin Artaud via C. P. Cavafy, John Berger, Guillaume Apollinaire, to Tristan Corbière, Giorgos Cheimonas, Virginia Woolf, Lou‐Kiang‐Tseu, Nikos Kavvadias, Walt Whitman, Théophile Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe, and many others – comes from the artist’s personal library. Only the titles of the works denote the source of origin for each text. The first drawing in the library – which the artist created in 2001, wishing to investigate how ‘such a powerful text can illustrate itself’ – is the Book of Revelation. Papaconstantinou realizes Walter Benjamin’s discovery, put forth in his 1931 essay entitled ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, that ‘of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method’; books, as she describes, ‘are written from the mind to the hand’, so that she can appropriate them and make them her own.”

– Instead of Writing, by Tina Pandi, 2011