Jonathan Rosic’s work reflects on our impermanence and our micro-disparitions. He lists, analyzes and amplifies the small cancellations of ourselves and tries to make perceptible the fading of time. His meticulous Indian ink drawings were inspired by film stills, personal or found photographs. These drawings focus on moments of voluntary or random concealment, on scenes of solitude, oblivion and incommunicability, on subjects or objects disappearing behind ambiguous gestures. The disappearance is expressed at different levels (that of the subject, hidden, or whose gaze is obstructed; that of the spectator, for the represented subject who does not see us anymore; that of the image, by dissipation by means of very diluted tones; finally, that of the artist’s hand, by a non-gestural technique, voluntarily placing him in the background behind his subject). In addition to his drawings, Jonathan Rosić indexes, within the banal and intimate world of found photos, clues to our erasure: repetitive traces, classified into gestural categories, where the sign of absence becomes sculptural.

In White cube, the drawings of the new series Touching from a Distance are based on old promotional photographs of inventions. Reproducing them in Indian ink, Jonathan Rosić subtracts the objects depicted and focuses solely on the hands now presenting only emptiness.

In Black cube, Jonathan Rosić immerses us in an investigation. He accumulates and assembles vernacular photos from his collection where doors and handles await a hand to activate appearance and disappearance. The series This is… presents the backs of amateur shots. The deictic expression “this is”, a display word, points with the index finger to some elements of reality that nevertheless escape the gaze.

Jonathan Rosić (1979, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels. Trained as an architect (La Cambre, Brussels), Jonathan Rosić has taught architecture, and studied painting (La Cambre). His awards include the Sabam Prize (Art Contest, Brussels, 2014), the Marcel Hastir Prize – Portrait (Royal Academy of Belgium, 2017) and the FID Prize International Drawing Prize (Paris, 2017). His drawings will be presented in focus at Drawing Now Paris in March 2023.