Drawings before going to sleep

by José Quintanar

200 pages
Offset 1 colour: silver
+ screen printed & die-cut cover
23 x 16.5 cm
1000 copies
Co-published with Handshake
2026

While everyone sleeps, I sit down to draw at the kitchen table. The same routine for many years. Sometimes with music, other times in complete silence. I draw things that are close to me, everyday objects, but also things I have photographed throughout the day: details, buildings, tools, landscapes. It is a way of remembering what was lived and transferring it to the space of a sheet of paper.

For several years I was interested in representing all of this through the line, understood as the primary unit of drawing. A bottle, nine lines. A landscape, sixteen. Drawing became a problem to be solved using a specific number of marks.

Almost two years ago I began a new investigation: to stop thinking of drawing in terms of line and begin to think of it in terms of form. I also abandoned technical drawing instruments in favour of a more immediate way of drawing: a pencil, a sheet of paper, and the movement of the hand.

The drawings gathered in this volume are the result of this process. What interests me lies not so much in the representation of reality as in the reality of representation, in the way the drawing is constructed.