Contemporary art talent - chosen so you don't have to...

Louise Despont

Practice: drawing / video

Click image to start slideshow of this artist's work ?

Louise Despont's exquisitely crafted drawings and animations have begun to capture the attention of the blogging community as well as art pundits, but the fact that they make for very superior eye candy doesn't, in this case, condemn them as mere decoration.

Despont's work is informed by a long-term interest in mystical, theological and cosmological systems, as well as related concerns with the spiritual and healing possibilities of art.

Comparisons with outsider art mystics such as Hilma af Klint or Emma Kunz are perhaps inevitable, but Despont's work is both more spacious and more knowing; employing, for example, subtle instances of asymmetry, or blurring distinctions between the printed grounds of antique ledger paper and her own, assured marks.

Principally created using architectural instruments and procedures, the underlying precision of Despont's drawings nevertheless invokes a tenebrous otherwordliness that ably combines rigorous structure with arcane possibility - an apt illustration of the references she attempts to invoke.