Sketch Studies of Erdenebat Tömörbaatar, a draftsman based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
There is a tendency, when confronted with works such as these, to describe them as studies—as preparatory, provisional, incomplete. This is a mistake. Erdenebat Tömörbaatar does not study form; he subjects it to conditions under which it must either persist or fail. What we are given are not sketches, but tests.
In Angularity Study, line behaves less as a boundary than as an assertion. The overlapping planes refuse stable hierarchy; no single geometry is permitted to dominate. Instead, the drawing distributes tension across a field of competing vectors, each one provisional, each one capable of collapse. The small interventions of color—those sharp, almost surgical reds—do not embellish but expose. They mark points of stress, as if the structure were being observed at the moment before fracture. The work does not resolve; it sustains.
The so-called Brutalist Chair Study is, in fact, an argument against the object it names. What remains of the chair is only its insistence on right angles, stripped of comfort, stripped even of usability. It is not a chair but a memory of orthogonality, held together by repetition rather than function. The lines accumulate not to describe volume, but to deny it. One begins to understand that for Tömörbaatar, the right angle is not a solution but a constraint—one that must be tested until it reveals its inadequacy.
The paired frames of the Perception Study introduce a more insidious instability. At first glance, they appear ordered, even decorative, but the diagonals quietly undermine this order. Each square contains within it the possibility of division, of asymmetry disguised as symmetry. The repetition of color bands suggests containment, yet the eye is continually drawn inward, toward a line that refuses to align with the frame that holds it. Perception here is not corrected; it is unsettled.
In Connection Study, the vocabulary shifts, but the problem remains. Points and lines assemble into what might be mistaken for a network, yet no hierarchy of connection is established. Each node is equally contingent, each link equally uncertain. The alternating red and blue markings suggest dual states—agreement and disagreement, presence and absence—but the system offers no resolution between them. It is a structure that records relation without ever stabilizing it.
Bent and Split States is perhaps the most overtly composed, and therefore the most deceptive. Circles and cubes, arcs and planes, intersect in a manner that suggests synthesis, but this synthesis is false. The forms do not integrate; they coexist in a state of negotiated tension. Color here becomes weight. The red fields press forward, the blues recede, and yet neither achieves dominance. The work proposes balance only to demonstrate its impossibility.
Finally, in Inter-mixing Unstable Coefficients Study, Tömörbaatar arrives at a condition approaching systematization, only to dismantle it from within. The grid—if it can still be called that—is both constructed and violated by diagonals that refuse obedience. The blue squares act as temporary anchors, but even they are insufficient to stabilize the surrounding field. What is most striking is not the complexity of the arrangement, but its refusal to settle into pattern. It is a system that resists becoming one.
Across these works, one observes a consistent refusal: the refusal of hierarchy, of resolution, of the comfort of completed form. Tömörbaatar does not produce images that can be consumed; he produces conditions that must be endured. The drawings do not ask to be understood. They ask whether understanding, as a stable endpoint, is ever available.
In this sense, these works are less about geometry than about the limits of control. Line, angle, and color are not tools of construction but instruments of pressure. They reveal, with a quiet and persistent severity, that structure is never given—it is only ever temporarily maintained.
- Sarnai Enkhjargal, critic and lecturer based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia