Artwork Description –
The Line, 2022
Digital video, 4K, sound
Duration 2:50 min
Ed. 3 + 2AP
The Line, 2022 is a cinematic drawing, a re-composition of recordings of the drawing process, which explores the agency of the drawn line and its shifting ambivalence as a carrier of meaning in the artmaking process.
Highlighting the artist’s ongoing exploration of the expanded practice of drawing, it upsets certainties typically thought to be embedded within it. Instead of focusing on the outcome, the work makes the intermediate parts of the drawing process as important as any final image, suggesting divergent temporal and ontological possibilities for the practice of drawing.

As a result, Keating’s cinematic drawings expose the frailty of decision-making within drawing practice. Mistakes and approximations become a part of the process, revealing a personal struggle with the meaning and agency of artistic gestures. As such, tracing a line becomes a point of contention, exposing a conflict between the desire to express oneself, against the medium’s constraints, which typically call for a studied ‘mastery’ of technique, which may ironically impede any possibility of expression.
Inhabiting a border between the analogue and the digital, The Line is also an example of what Pavle Levi called ‘cinema by other means.’ An exploration of hybrid modes of filmmaking and drawing, juxtaposing scientific and art historical forms of the documentary with digital drawing practices. The artist cites the structure of the film essay and the works of Chris Marker and Adam Curtis as influences, a format that seeks to cross-pollinate between different modes of knowledge in a liquification of traditional forms.
Biography - David Keating
David Keating is an Australian contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice engages installation, drawing, video, performance, and public sculpture. Based in Europe throughout the 2000s, he became known for his expanded drawings and sculptural environments that explored the physical, social and ontological relationships between architecture, institutions, and the viewer. More recently, through works on paper and videos the artist calls ‘cinematic drawings’ he has developed an idiosyncratic personal iconography that explores contemporary cultural vocabularies and the limits of artistic language.
Solo exhibitions include Endless Nameless, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Passage, RaebervonStenglin, Zurich and Habitual Despair at Conners Conners, Melbourne. He has participated in significant international group exhibitions such as The Brussels Biennial 1, Belgium and at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, and produced public art commissions for the Bass Museum of Art, Miami and Art Altstetten Albisrieden, Zurich.
He has been awarded the Australia Council Studio Residency, Los Angeles, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim, Norway and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust Scholarship. He holds a BFA from The Victorian College of the Arts and is currently undertaking a Ph.D. at La Trobe University; his research topic is Against fixation, the Ambivalence of the Drawn Line in Contemporary Art.