Dog, 2018

Charcoal on paper, 240 × 160 cm
Assembled from sixteen sheets
© K37 Studio, Bethanien Art Center, Berlin

Text by noT

Dog is a large-scale charcoal drawing built from sixteen joined sheets of paper. At 240 × 160 cm, the work creates a landscape held in tension: between motion and stillness, clarity and ambiguity, silence and approaching sound.

The drawing lives in a moment of delay — like seeing lightning before hearing thunder. That short distance between perception and impact is where the image begins.

At the center of the composition, a mountain rises quietly. It is solid, dark, and almost immovable, holding the structure of the image together. Above it, the sky refuses to settle. Clouds churn and gather through fast, charged strokes of charcoal. The mountain feels permanent. The sky feels unstable.

This contrast gives the work its pressure. Nothing dramatic has happened yet, but everything seems close to changing. The storm does not explode. It waits.

The title, Dog, is simple but charged. It is “God” in reverse. The inversion does not explain the drawing, but it opens another layer inside it: above and below, divine and earthly, presence and absence, order and reversal. Like the mountain, the title remains still while carrying something unresolved.

Charcoal is essential to that uncertainty. Its range of greys and blacks allows the landscape to exist between matter and atmosphere. The mountain has weight, but the sky feels almost audible. Light, shadow, pressure, and erasure move through the drawing without ever reaching a final resolution.

Dog is about thresholds. The space before change. The moment before sound arrives. The pause before meaning becomes clear.

It is a quiet work, but not a passive one. Its force comes from what it holds back: the storm not yet released, the word turned inside out, the mountain standing in silence while everything above it begins to move.

nOT