Cunningham’s series of figures covered by hoods and cloaks is short but impressive. These images are a unique attempt to convey the human forms by concealing their representation. The figures’ bodies are enveloped by airy layers of fabric, transformed into volatile, floating beings that seem to barely clinging to any definition of shape. They all wear large cloaks, hoods or hats, hiding their bodily materiality from the viewer, almost becoming one with the fabrics. Shadows, when present, are inconsistent and seem to fade instantly, as if these bodies were floating into emptiness; the figures hide their faces, almost refusing to return the viewer’s gaze. These characters enact reticence and restraint, producing a space that is entirely imaginative, permeated by silence, ultimately timeless. They suggest a figuration in which, rather than conveying meanings or facilitating vision, drawing is more about hiding, omitting, or leaving unsaid.

These enigmatic drawings seem to challenge conventional artistic tenets, questioning at the same time our relationship with the materiality of corporeal existence. Traditionally, artists would learn how to reproduce bodies through anatomical studies, in the belief that only lifelike representations could convey clear emotional meanings which would be accessible and relatable to all viewers. Conversely, the drawings of this series allow viewers to engage with a new kind of representation of the human body that privileges animation and inventiveness over the transmission of normative anatomical knowledge.

Cunningham crafted images that confound both their own medium and viewers’ perception, creating endless networks of paired figures and recessive planes. They represent the human body, but rework it into a site of transformation. De-spatialising the body, investigating how it forms relationships with the material surface of paper and the abstract space of the image itself, is a productive strategy to allow these images to realise their potential. These figurations suggest the impossibility of perceiving the body as a coherent, stable form, and the necessity to experiment with it.

Unlike the series that depict nude female bodies intent in frenzied dances or performances, these figures are manifestly desexed. Viewers cannot tell the anatomies of the figures hidden behind cloaks and hoods. In a sense, these images mitigate the body as a contested site of political and social tensions. It becomes something akin to a philosophical framework, like an uncharted territory to explore through imagination. These sexless bodies become transformative sites which allow the possibility of representing the body as a process rather than a finite, static entity.

All these figures, entirely wrapped in loose cloths, are deliberately turning away from the viewer, as if walking away from the space of the drawing itself and disappearing into nothingness. Through bodily motions that deny a full view, the possibility of knowledge is prevented. And yet, these images also seem to possess a subtle agency, which demands from viewers a closer, more intimate engagement. Why would an image, an object explicitly made to be viewed, frustrate vision, functioning against the dominant logics of ocularity and perception? This series seems to negate corporeality, transforming the body into a mass of swinging fabric that lead the viewer’s gaze up and down the figuration in twirling motions. In the absence of a face, a site of definite signification, the cloaks seem to function as weights, pulling the body down preventing its inevitable evanescence.

These figures are, in a sense, performing their own absence, resisting, as it were, the logic of the documentation, denying the possibility of apprehending a body outside the physical realm of time and space. Bodies cannot be seen, then, not because ink gradually disappears from the page, corrupted by the passing of time, but because what they perform is, perhaps, the impossibility or unwillingness of retaining coherent, cohesive mental images. In this series, possibilities of multiple interpretations arise from the interaction of an individual figure and surrounding space.