If we must talk, write, wrap in words, weed, describe, then the first thing to note is the chosen technique, its intrinsic melancholy, its “streaming with tears” quality. Marc Molk makes “wet drawings”.

It takes courage to abandon carefully crafted, finely drawn compositions that greedily ate up so much time and precision to the workings of water. I have been told several drawings, many drawings, did not survive. One can’t command water to make a right or a left, one almost can’t. The lines dissolve, lose their precision, gain fluidity, complexity. Sometime it’s hair let loose, forming a sort of mane. Sometimes it’s the traces of the pattering of tiny and violent raindrops, breaking up “the thread of the line”. The thread remains, though; sometimes only the ghost of a trail, nearly orange.

For we must talk of colours. These drawings are red, or, rather, pinkish red. One thinks of blood, too obviously, of those “toiles de Jouy” involving the forest, it’s a track written with a teacher’s pen of good and not so good marks, leading to the pink of innocence, to the pink of sex. Ultimately it’s the softness of it that lingers, the softness of a line that makes the paper “bleed”, in the same way the paper sometimes makes us bleed, when the edge of a sheet, razor-blade-like, cuts our fingers.

This slight damage, this intended alteration, can be found in the subjects represented here. Paradoxically, they appear both as nostalgic but still slightly acidic events. A young lady is presented with the gift of a cat, but her smile is scary and it looks like she’s squeezing the animal too hard. And this group of friends bathing in the water of the gorge of the Verdon a long time ago is also somewhat ridiculous, beyond the strange sadness emanating from the scene.

Marc Molk, in this series of wet drawings, seems to be suffering from a “pink spleen”, the shadow of a disease of the soul. A soul that no longer believes in preserving things and beings, that lets his drawings live out their fate in the rain.