Record of Nighttime gathers selected drawings in graphite, ink, and silverpoint on prepared and unprepared papers, drawn from an ongoing body of work rather than presented as a closed collection. The works are made slowly, through repeated contact. Line builds over line, small marks gather into figures, fields, objects, and signs. A surface becomes dense enough to hold an image in time, though not always to release it fully.

 

Graphite, ink, and silverpoint each require a different way of staying with the image. One can be darkened and revised, one stains and fixes, one leaves a fine metallic trace that changes with light and time. Some papers are worked directly, while others are prepared with rabbit-skin glue, ground, and bone ash, so that the surface itself becomes part of the drawing’s resistance and refinement.

 

Pietru Farrugia’s relationship with dreams is long-standing and personal. Some of his earliest memories are of sharing dreams with his mother. Later, dreams became part of his own therapeutic training and inward work. In these drawings, that history remains private but present, giving the work an atmosphere rather than a subject.

 

Some drawings come from dreams. Others come from what remains after a dream has passed. A skull, a star, a body, a doorway, or a line of landscape may appear clearly, but never entirely fixed. The drawings are less concerned with telling the dream than with recording what remains of it, a mark, a mood, a partial image, the residue of something that has passed across the paper.

 

These works ask for close looking. Their force is often in what is nearly hidden, in a field of dense marks, a silver trace, a figure arriving slowly through the surface. They are records of contact between hand and paper, night and waking, matter and memory.