All too often, “delicate” is a faintly derisive attribute used to characterize an artwork’s conceptual pretense or its material feebleness. Worse yet, it connotes something about the maker’s constitution. In spite of all of this, “This Dust Was Gentlemen and Ladies,” Christiana Soulou’s debut exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ and the first major presentation of the artist’s drawings in London, is purposefully delicate. As the title indicates, the thirty-six drawings, mainly of single figures, invoke life’s ephemerality, often by way of characters whose drawn form fades into the page. In the case of the harlequin Mr. Knoll (all works 2007), one of the few in which she departs from the sole use of graphite to include smudged red pencil, a portion of his head has vanished. In addition to being faintly rendered, Soulou’s figures are fragmented in form; many have hinged limbs like puppets, a resemblance that is enhanced by their solitude on the page. Untitled (The Chamber Maid 1) and Untitled exemplify this. If delicately composed of faint lines and quick, wispy gestures, they are also embodied. The chamber maid lifts her skirt in a gesture that is part graciously contrived and part cloyingly erotic, an acknowledgement of her complicity in her seductive puppetry. In the latter work, the nearly headless figure is itself complicitly rigid as its body becomes unbalanced from its phallic perch. Yet Soulou has drawn its fingers as tense tendrils ready to grasp hold of something stable and regain its composure. Since none of the drawings is larger than twenty-six inches in either height or width (and some are as small as eleven by nine inches), one is left feeling satisfied rather than overwhelmed. Soulou’s drawing style may be delicate, but its effect is robust.
