The astonishing drawings of Harvey Tulcensky offer themselves as a kind of autobiography – but of what? Of states of mind? Like Henri Michaux’s automatic inscriptions, a kind of dreaming under the influence of blank white space? Possibly an autobiography of spiritual crises, encounters with the void, examples of a horror vacui that keeps the hand moving toward total density, a plenitude brought into being against negation. In these drawings voids continually open up – erupt may be a better word – only to be contained, encircled, filled in or gridded over. Tulcensky’s mark making has its ebbs and flows, its currents and vortices of energy. We are tempted to attribute them to anxiety, based on the all too convenient notion that their labor- intensiveness constitutes an obsession, even a form of derangement. But does it? In their accordion format, the drawings seem to unfold in time and space even though their movement is constantly impacted, halted, turned back on itself by their intricacy. We can’t read them but we can follow them.

This is what I mean: When the hand of this artist draws, it does not follow a predetermined path, tracing a map laid out in the head, before the eyes, an itinerary already known. It follows nothing. It finds its way. How? The hand is part of the body, the Greek soma, and the body also includes the organ of vision (the eye). The body is the foundation of vision, and through the hand as much as through the eye, the body, in drawing, sees.

Of course, we can never see our own sight. We can’t observe ourselves seeing. It is prohibited by our physiology, our body.This is the blind spot at the center of vision. But in these compulsive drawings, the hand makes something to be seen by seeing as it goes The drawing, then, is not a finished and delivered item of information, a dead thing, a deposit, a fact, but something formed in the totality of sensory experience, delivered into that experience and assimilated back into the psyche (and back into the body). In the artist, the drawings bridge both the sensible and the sensing. The root strangeness of vision is that it is interwoven with Being, and Being is being-in-a-body. Although the artist can’t see that either, he can draw it. The artist approaches a perfect expression of what critic James Campbell has called “the carnal code of the visible,” the dynamic of seeing and being.

Tulcensky’s drawings have been likened to that of outsider artists. I believe there is a deep kinship, but again it has nothing to do with any pathological state. Comparing his work with that of Hiroyuki Doi, for example, I wonder at the power of the drawing circuit, a neurological feedback loop so intense that it cancels out everything external to itself. Within this circuit – made up of the eye, the hand, the contents of the mind – energy might travel forever. Looking at Tulcensky’s drawings, or rather falling into them with my eyes, hence my body, I understand that the blank sheet is not a confrontation with the terror of the void but an irresistible invitation to the body of the artist. It says: draw, see, be.