Jeran Avery’s drawings hurtle around you at City Ice Arts

If you’ve ever maligned drawing as mere practice (sketchbook scribbles, tentative pencil scratches), a trip to City Ice Arts this month should set you straight. Jeran Avery’s latest solo exhibition, Drawing on Form, shows the artist’s fluency in the exacting languages of geometry and classical mechanics. His concave figures emerge from sharp angles and crisp, even lines to lure you inside each careful ink meditation.

And then the wildcat growl of a Ducati 1098 rips through the gallery, and you’re ready to trade serenity for speed. The fusion of human and machine comes into view, and you consider the contradictions: mathematical perfection next to mortal error, patience alongside the punchy purr of a high-speed sport bike.

A custom-patterned helmet and matching Ducati body draw your attention first, calling to mind the biomechanical drawings of H.R. Giger. The skull design might seem like a Moto cliché, but the medium is anything but: Avery relies on subdued graphite marks, layering textured pools of pencil to form the skulls’ subtle shadows. The matte-white coating on both helmet and bike departs from traditional gleaming, automotive candy paint. Both pieces seem ossified, as if carved from bone.

Avery makes little attempt to conceal the artist’s hand, even when it’s gripping the throttle: Hairline scratches on the 1098’s body confirm another, more practical life for his bike. The helmet came first, he says, and sparked a curiosity for how the pencil design might translate to other forms. “I knew I wanted to do it on a larger scale,” Avery explains. “And I only had one bike.”

His Bristol-board drawings reveal human effort and error more deliberately. From a distance, the forms seem flawless, almost computer-drafted. Step closer, and the tiny imperfections come into focus: pencil outlines not quite erased, subtle smudges and flecks in the ballpoint-pen ink.

Avery’s drawings take on an almost fibrous quality, the parallel lines stretched taut on the page like the warp of a loom. At City Ice Arts, they dominate one wall, a bold array of vivid colors and plaited shapes. Only one piece is titled: “Desmo,” a boxy drawing soaked in red ink. The name may have been inspired by the Ducati’s desmodromic valve, but it has a relevant Greek root, too — desmos, or knot. That’s what Avery’s drawings offer us: tight, angular knots, two-dimensional origami folded into impossible configurations.

That “Desmo” bears a name gives it more weight than the other pieces, but the drawing’s longer sides and shallow folds are less visually interesting than some of Avery’s other works here. One of the show’s most intriguing drawings hangs nearby, deep black marker masking Avery’s gentle pen lines. Moody colors glisten underneath, barely visible behind the murky Sharpie overlay.

Across the gallery, drawings on ultra-thin steel synthesize the show’s automotive and organic elements. The forms are similar to Avery’s Bristol drawings, but the palette is more subdued, keeping your focus on the intricate architecture. Tiny imperfections are visible here as well, in bubbles left from the surface paint and smears in the black ink. The steel iterations shine under the gallery lights, the gentle gleam of Sharpie lines on white automotive paint. (Whether the marriage of art and acceleration seems more natural when you leave the gallery or feels somehow odder, a neat fiction companion to this exhibition awaits you: The Flamethrowers, novelist Rachel Kushner’s excellent 2013 National Book Award finalist about the intersection of the New York art world, Italian Moto empires and land-speed records.)

Avery’s drawings required painstaking care to execute, but slowness is the last thing on your mind when you view them. The Ducati was built to move, but it’s the artist’s long lines that you want to ride. They streak across the gallery like headlights in the night.