Blackbooks exhibits a wide range of figures, fantastic beings, animals, androgynous plants, many, many plants and flowers, arising from Werens’s overflowing imagination throughout his artist life. A stash of each of the stages of his work to this day. From the first sketches to the intimate moments captured in their countless travel books, scattered life clippings that gain coherence by being gathered. The strokes of an artist in lifelong learning, in constant evolution, from a perpetual observer with a sharp-tip pen embedded between the fingers. Whoever knows Werens will have seen him on more than one occasion, on the train, at home, in any space public or even in the midst of nature, abducted by some image, by some scene that has struck it, immersed in their inseparable blackbooks, floating in a bubble, the time stopped, only their pencil beating indefatigable. And this exhibition, which comes to us at a time when we are reviewing the time that runs away, reveals drawings and sketches hidden in these books, many of which had been locked in some drawer; books that now deploy their sheets before us for the first time.
Ivone Puig Artigas