Art and writing
Writing is a crossroads. Drawing, painting and writing come together in the stroke. Calligraphy stands between the form of its sign and the meaning of its whole. This is how the greatest Chinese painters have assimilated the gesture of painting and the gesture of writing.
From certain compositions of the Italian Renaissance - such as Fra Angelico's annunciations where words can be read in gold letters - to works by modern or contemporary artists, writing regularly takes on a pictorial dimension. Whether in obedience to established conventions of language or as a purely formal echo of calligraphy, the written form takes part in the subject of the painting.
The canvases of Hans Hartung, Cy Twombly and Fabienne Verdier, however different they may be, find a common thread: the gesture of writing. Whatever the reference language, the letter, alone or in combination, intervenes in the composition as a motif in its own right. Today, street art formulates the acme of this encounter between the pictorial and the written word: the letter is a motif, and vice versa. An illusory immediacy of reading, so much so that the distortion of certain well-known characters can require the viewer to pause and contemplate.
For Henri Michaux, signs of life are created: "Who hasn't wanted to grasp more, to grasp better, to grasp differently, both beings and things, not with words, nor with phonemes, nor onomatopoeia, but with graphic signs? Who hasn't wanted one day to make an alphabet book, a bestiary, and even a whole vocabulary, from which the verbal would be excluded?"[1]
Quick or diligent, thoughtful or spontaneous, gesture marks writing. Its traces become part of its meaning, it seems. The echo of the gesture inhabits the letter, just as the meaning infuses the word, or the motif shapes the painting.
Mahault de Raymond-Cahuzac
