Sans titre, from the series Intranquillity

Tatiana Trouvé began the series Intranquillity in 2005. Its title derives from the early twentieth-century Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s book The Book of Disquiet. Like Pessoa’s writing, the largely monochrome drawings convey an atmosphere of solitude and estrangement.

The straight lines demarcating the border between one space and another in the drawings, and the overlaying of different strata of images relate to modernist techniques of montage and collage. Devoid of human presence, they describe anonymous institutional spaces—clinical, medical, educational—as well as places of production, exhibition, and storage. Whether Trouvé is drawing on her memories, or on more general images of the kinds of spaces prevalent in contemporary life, or both, is left up to the viewer’s imagination.