Paul Doeman’s A Diary of Object Drawings and its presentation within the LAPIEZA Galaxy Series at 5th Base Gallery, curated by Anto Lloveras, articulate a rigorously sustained inquiry into the ontology of the everyday. Structured around the injunction “draw an object a day,” Doeman’s practice foregrounds seriality as both discipline and poetics: a durational commitment that transforms minor, often overlooked вещи into protagonists of a cumulative narrative. The 1,600 cut-out drawings, suspended and spatialised into a cloud-like installation, displace drawing from its conventional planar destiny into a quasi-sculptural condition.
This gesture aligns the work with post-minimal and conceptual legacies, yet its affective temperature remains markedly intimate. Doeman’s objects—gloves, bottles, hats, knives, seed pods, banana skins—are not neutral readymades but carriers of proximity, memory, and use. Rendered through a hybrid graphic language that fuses traditional pastel drawing with crisp digital contouring, they oscillate between artisanal touch and diagrammatic clarity. In this oscillation, Doeman stages a quiet resistance to the spectacular economies of contemporary art, substituting attention for excess and duration for event. The “diary” format further embeds the work in a temporal ethics: each drawing is both autonomous and subordinate to the totality, asserting that meaning emerges not from singular virtuosity but from sustained, cumulative care. Within the curatorial framework developed by Lloveras, Doeman’s practice is recontextualised as socioplastic: a material-relational field in which objects, situations, and human proximities co-produce meaning. The 5th Base Gallery installation does not merely display drawings; it choreographs a navigable ecology of suspended fragments, inviting viewers into a bodily negotiation with floating вещes. This spatial dramaturgy literalises the LAPIEZA ethos of unstable installation, in which artworks function less as fixed entities than as nodes within a mutable constellation. The cut-out drawings, mounted on cardboard and elevated from the wall, generate a low-tech three-dimensionality that refuses the seamless illusions of digital spectacle. Their material modesty—pastel, cardboard, thread—operates as a counter-aesthetic to high-production exhibition culture, reinforcing the ethical coherence between means and ends. Lloveras’s curatorial narration situates Doeman’s work within a broader cartography of London encounters—markets, Brutalist architectures, fish meals on the Isle of Dogs—where art, urban drift, and everyday ritual interpenetrate. These contextual works do not merely frame the exhibition; they become part of its semantic infrastructure, folding lived experience into the exhibitionary grammar. The result is a curatorial intimacy that resists both institutional monumentalism and purely relational conviviality, favouring instead a calibrated poetics of proximity.
Doeman’s insistence on “one object a day” also invokes a post-conceptual reworking of On Kawara’s date paintings and Tehching Hsieh’s durational performances, yet without their ascetic extremity or existential austerity. Where those practices monumentalised time through negation or endurance, Doeman monumentalises it through accumulation and gentleness. Each drawing registers a micro-decision: what object deserves today’s attention? This decision-making process becomes the true subject of the work, rendering authorship as an ethics of selection rather than an assertion of mastery. The animation of objects—suggested both in the exhibition’s title and in the floating choreography of the installation—does not anthropomorphise things in a naïve manner. Instead, it acknowledges what new materialist theory has termed the agency of objects: their capacity to shape human behaviour, memory, and affect. Doeman’s drawings visualise this agency not through spectacle but through repetition, insisting that the banal accrues symbolic density when encountered with sustained care. In this sense, the project performs a quiet epistemological critique of consumerist temporality, where objects are designed for rapid obsolescence. By contrast, Doeman’s serial devotion arrests the circulation of things long enough for them to be seen, named, and remembered. Under Lloveras’s curatorship, A Diary of Object Drawings is thus absorbed into LAPIEZA’s broader cosmology as a galaxy of minor intensities. It exemplifies what might be termed a low-resolution monumentalism: a scale of ambition that is temporal rather than spatial, cumulative rather than spectacular. The floor pieces, suspended clouds, and process videos function as translational devices, extending the ontology of the drawings into performative and documentary registers. This expanded field situates Doeman’s work within a lineage of conceptual craft, where repetition, care, and material modesty become critical strategies.
In an art world increasingly dominated by algorithmic circulation and institutional gigantism, the Doeman–Lloveras collaboration proposes an alternative economy of value grounded in slowness, intimacy, and attentiveness. It is precisely this economy that renders the work politically resonant without overt political content: it reconditions perception, retraining the viewer to attend to what is structurally ignored. In doing so, it reaffirms drawing not as a preparatory or secondary medium, but as a sovereign mode of thought, capable of sustaining an ethics of attention over time.
Lloveras, A. (2015) Paul Doeman – A Diary of Object Drawings, London. Available at: http://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/paul-doeman-good-morning-london.html
