David Dernie

Genuine creativity transcends explicit experience and rules. It is rooted in the depth of cultural memory, implicit visual intelligence and creative spontaneity.

The traditional relationship between drawing, painting and architecture, considered until very recently as natural, became today rather problematic. In a superficial understanding of the new means of representation it appears that it is possible to substitute the role of drawing by different media and eventually by a pure, emancipated digital representation.

The question of creativity is much discussed today, particularly in relation to the new possibilities of productive thinking, which claims all creativity for itself. What is hidden in this claim is the fact that productive thinking lives on the results of creativity, which it can never substitute. Genuine creativity transcends explicit experience and rules. It is rooted in the depth of cultural memory, implicit visual intelligence and creative spontaneity. This level of creative process is not directly accessible to the explicit representation, exemplified most clearly in the monologue of digital options, which depend entirely on explicit rules.

The uncritical faith in the universality of explicit representation obscures the fact that we still have an access to the spontaneous level of creativity through drawings and paintings. This is well demonstrated in the work of David Dernie, who is committed to exploring and understanding better the spontaneous level of creativity as a preparatory stage of design, including architecture, using as a vehicle original kinds of drawings, absorbed most often in paintings.

The character of Dernie's painting is defined by the intention to return to the stage of design where the first attempt to visualise the content of design is taking place. The process of visualisation can be described also as materialisation, or more precisely, as the first encounter with the material conditions of the later, more abstract stages of design. The encounter with the material conditions depends on the use of material imagination, which Gaston Bachelard once described as an ‘amazing need for participation which, going beyond the attraction of the imagination of forms, thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it or in other words materializes the imaginary.... Whenever images appear in series, they point to a primal matter, a fundamental element.’ The presence and role of imagination in this elementary stage of design is revealed in the figurative character of Dernie's painting. This can be seen in the use of textures, forming identifiable patterns, which together with the use of light contribute to the configuration of elementary space. The introduction of drawing or collage contribute further to the articulation of the painting as a whole. The resulting sequence of steps can be compared with John Ruskin's description of the articulated texture of stone in the wall of the cathedral: ‘There is history in them, [...] in all their veins and zones and their disconnected lines. Their colours write various legends, never untrue, of the former political states of the mountain kingdom to which this marble belonged, of its infirmities and fortitudes, convulsions and consolidations, from the beginning of time’.

Proust quotes Ruskin and it is interesting that he also compares A la recherche du temps perdu to a cathedral. He is not referring to a formal analogy between his text and the structure of a cathedral but to the intimate link between the narrative and memory embodied in the written text, and the deeply embodied anticipation of writing in stone. The anticipation of writing is in principle similar to the anticipation of drawing, which culminates in the precise geometry of architecture. In Dernie's paintings geometry returns to the forming gesture and to the elementary language of things, the foundation of the more elaborate structure of space in buildings, cities and landscape. This is clearly apparent, particularly in the calligraphic elements of Dernie's painting, bringing together individual parts of the painting in a similar way as it was done in cubism and surrealism.

As a result, it is possible to use here the analogy of George Braque's statement, that 'there are relationships between objects that sometimes give us the feeling of infinity in painting. Life is revealed in all its nakedness as if outside our thoughts. I am not searching for definition, I tend towards infinition.'

The articulation of the more elaborate content, potentially present in the elementary stage of painting anticipates, and to some extent reveals, the tension between the silence of the architectural body and the iconicity that is potentially present there. This tension, characteristic of the whole history of architecture, tells us more about the nature and unity of space than many analytical studies. The universality of imagination that plays a dominating role in this tension is co-extensive with the universality of language. Like language, it can transform the material image into a pictorial one and eventually into the iconicity of concepts, geometry and digital representation.

The relationship between drawing, painting and architecture is for David Dernie the main goal of his effort. Seen as a whole, his work contributes to a deeper understanding of the question of architectural representation and as a result, to the much debated question of the language of architecture. The beginning of the answer to both questions can be found in the representational link of architecture and painting. We can find at least part of the answer there, but only if we remember, that representation does not imply that something merely stands in for something else, as if it were a replacement or substitute that enjoyed a less authentic, more indirect kind of existence, and that what is represented is itself present in the only possible way available to it.