Rui Leão*

Sketching is the inspirational instrument into inventiveness and research in Architecture, Design, sculpture…I am not referring to the sketch per se, as an image that one can gaze into, but as a process of transferring mental fusion into a solid pattern.

So when we look we should wander into the drawing and look for that energy that crossed a moment of intense belief, from nothingness into being. So drawings are like the disposed vests of a creative process, existing not for the sake of its own beauty, but essentially, for being a vehicle of our human capacity to transform and reorder everything into never ending awe and wonder.

Our eyes are constantly scanning the order of the world, and storing, reassembling, reviewing, assessing and reordering the infinite database of images, forms, systems and codes. This is a constant and universal process that binds us to our lives, and then there is sketching, a supreme form of output that tries constantly to synthesize the database into new interpretations of our mirrored existence: Creativity is the ultimate form of godliness.

Drawings are devotional objects, and just like praying, they take us through our hand, to a place where our faith in the world and Nature are consumed into the sense of beyond within, a sense that not only the pen is an extension of our body, but the paper, the table where it sits on, the space that houses that table, the windows that break that space into the rest of an immensely meaningful universe.

A sketch is all of this and much more.

*Architect