Drawing is for Giacometti another breathing. In order to model or paint one must have earth, canvas, colours. Drawing is possible anywhere, at any time, and Giacometti draws anywhere, at any time. He draws to see and can see nothing without drawing, mentally at any rate: each thing seen is drawn within him. The drawing eye of Giacometti knows no rest, no faigue. Nor does our eye, as it contemplates his drawings, have the right to rest. it is forbidden to linger over a detail, a form, an empty space. A strange, perpetual motion, without which it would lose sight of the subject, draws it on.
This optical phenoneomon results from the very nature of Giacometti's drawing, from its mobility which is the product of the repetition and discontinuity of the line. The form is never immobilised by an outline or held within isolated and sure strokes. It is not detached from the background or separated by a ressuring boundary from the space which surrounds it. It issues from a multitude of overlapping lines which correct and weigh down each oter, and abolish one another as liness they increase. Thus the line is never continuous but broken, interrupted, open at every moment on the void but revoking it at once by its renewals, its unforeseen returns.
This results in an imprecision of detail and an intentional indefiniteness which repel the eye at each impact, as though by a minature electric shock, sending it from one detail to the next, and from each to the totality which they produce as they disappear. These goings and comings, this dancing race of our eye, gives us the subject to see at a distance, as Giacometti sees it, in its impassable space, across the ambient void which disturbs and infects its image.
[...] In its rapid whorls the drawing carves our depth, or rather breathes it in, opens itself to it and renders its active between the strokes. It is as though a force issuing from within beings or things gushes out like a fluid through the interstices of the drawing and the porousness of the forms. And the lines must reveal this force, that is, both contain it and provoke its escape. This is the reason for their discontinuity. The interruptions and accumlations of line are never felt as superflous repetitions and incongruous stops since they are the equivalent of the eye's mobility. On the contrary they contribute to give the objects this trembling, this feeling of truth and life.
[...] When Matisse draws a leaf with his lively and supple line, he also fixes it in a single one of its appearance and thus immobilises it tyrannically for eternity. Giacometti cannot or dose not care to gather such an image and immolate it according to his whims. As he multiplies its possibilities of seeming, he leaves the object its uncertain development, its anxious mobility. He does not draw up a single course but opens a multitude of paths among which the object can choose, or at least seem to hesitate continually, drawing from its indecision its quivering autonomy and the trembling of a separate life.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
