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Drawings by Thomas Colbert is on view May 21 to August 14 at the Architecture Center Houston. Click here for more details and read Bernard Bonnet's brief essay on the drawings below.

The beauty of Thomas Colbert’s drawings lies in their complexity. When I saw his work for the first time, I immediately thought of the myth of Ariadne's thread and the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. Which one of these thousands of lines that escape all around from the dark jumble should I unroll to get to the core? When I discovered recently the very beginning of Colbert's drawings, the sumptuous free-hand volutes, the purity of these lines, I perceived the complexity of the ensemble. At that point, we are poles apart from the scribbles one might see first. There is a construction (the architect/artist?), a patient weaving (many of his drawings do look like fabrics), an endless progression. In a scribble, there is no attention, no focus: it is only a leisurely, instinctive movement of the hand. Colbert’s drawings are obsessive, relentless, never finished and this is the reason for which he cannot draw anything else.

I have always been fascinated by artists who, again and again, paint the same motif, writers who always tell the same story that are, of course, never the same. Some of the drawings are almost black, flat monochromes, some are lighter, more playful with a form, a wave that breaks through, and sometimes Colbert adds to the black light some tiny points of colors, basic ones---red, blue, green---letting us see the different layers of the drawing.

He does not need more than a ball pen. Even if the tool is modest, minimal, the final work is immensely sophisticated. The format does not matter, large or tiny, his labyrinth fits. We see the hours of diligence under the lamp to accomplish what we could look at forever, closer and closer.

Thomas Colbert is on the faculty at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston. He served as chair of the Cite editorial committee, guest edited the Hurricane and Environment special issues, and is a frequent contributor to the publication.

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