do the write thing :
read between the lines #3
The gallery presents from April 2 to May 15, 2022 do the write thing #3, the third part of a group exhibition exploring the theme of writing , more than forty works produced by twenty artists. These scriptural compositions invite us to decipher the hidden meaning of works in which the authors use language in various visual forms to express thoughts, emotions, secrets, frustrations, and the quest for another world.
What goes on “in the space between the readable and the visible” – as Michel Thévoz calls it – or in what Dubuffet referred to as “implicit languages”?
What happens when meaning escapes, hidden beneath the profusion of signs? When, writing a drawing or drawing writing, all that counts is to say, to tell, with all the means at one’s disposal.
The risk, no doubt, is that this metalanguage might traverse the sky without hitting any target. Making it even more obvious that no-one other than its author could be the recipient. Unless, unless one of us were to be passing by, ready to be moved by this soliloquy, ready to comprehend, literally to take into oneself this semantic outpouring similar to the “Babelian impulse”. And this someone would de facto become the providential recipient of this sibylline surge, not as an outstanding cryptographer, but as someone who would rediscover in themselves all the potentialities of expression. As able to feel the evocative power of the ideogram, image and text inextricably combined, as in immemorial times, or to enjoy the ramblings in which science and poetry go hand in hand. Or even to experience the little music of graphorrhoeas that unfold like mantras.
Rhythm and composition, in constant tension, seem to want to reveal a new meaning, primal, like a scream. Moreover, as we speak of bursts of speech, should we not speak of bursts of signs? Thus, any glossography would appear to us not as an inability to master the codes of language, but rather as the deep manifestation of an urgency, reinforced by the need to escape reductive conventions. This major deviation allows whoever undertakes it to tread unexplored paths, to bring new answers to unresolved questions; when it is not simply a question of protecting from profane intrusions into the mystery or the sacred that might be revealed there.
What is striking in these palimpsests, these magical ciphers, these sedimented words, these hypnotic iterations, these secret terms, these asemic writings, is the formidable plasticity of a primordial language that would contain all the others.
As Jean-Marie Gallais writes, “The signifiers end up being detached from the signified, and become music for the eyes”.
Text : Jean-Marie Gallais
Forewords : Christian Berst
Catalog published to mark the exhibition do the write thing : read between the lines #3, from April 2 to May 15, 2022.
This catalog will be available at the gallery and online on April 26, 2022.