I for illegible. “Writing and drawing are similar in their essence,” said Paul Klee, who claimed the right for the visual artist to return resolutely to the earlier gesture of the child who draws before learning to read or write. There is in the desire to make the text unreadable something akin to the joy of a remarkable regression to a pre-linguistic state, the jubilant return to that moment when the child’s eye recognizes in the indecipherable scribbles of written words the forms of a mystery so total that it requires all the resources of dreams and imagination to overcome it. Remember the times when you “read” comic strips before being able to decipher the speech bubbles. Well, now that you can read, it is up to you to figure out how to understand the panels saturated with calligraphic traces and impenetrable images, with only fragments of readable words that the artist has generously provided to your perspicacity as the key to the secret.
M as Metamorphoses. The artist’s visual creations take the venture of disguising the sign. From a text written in French on a blank page—like a draft of a letter, the beginning of a story, or notes on a page of reflections—the artist makes this pre-text the basis for what poster artists like Villeglé, Rotella, Hains, or Aeschbacher referred to as obliteration: something that nullifies and conceals the initial meaning to give rise to a transfiguration: the transformation of torn words into a genuine world. In this overlay of cursive writing, what unfolds before our eyes is the construction of a setting populated by new chimerical beings where the eye might recognize Persian shapes of a paradise bird, the wisdom of a meditative rabbit, the vortex of a school of tropical fish, the pincers of a fearsome crab, or the proliferation of a multitude of xylophagous insects that may eventually devour the very space of their appearance.
E as Enlacings and Illuminations. The concept of text being originally linked to the idea of weaving and fabrics is highlighted—and even glorified—by the enlacings, nets, knots, points, crossings, and chains of patterns that compose the inextricable network of these tapestries saturated with enigmas. How many hours of patience and persistence did it take the weaver of these senseless embroideries for the page to fill, thread by thread, with the ink laid down on the paper by the fine point of the brush and pen? However, through the clever arrangement of these figures, the weave of the interlacings also becomes illumination: a wild and precious composition where the image emerging from the graphic scription rivals with the writing of unreadable calligraphies to form the Book of Hours of a civilization—whether vanished or future—accustomed to cataclysms and enchantments. For in each of these pages with their magnetic charm, which the shaman artist has meticulously inscribed with esoteric formulas, there is also something of a talisman or an initiatory tablet. The very ritual of the graphic gestures imposes itself with its power of enchantment.
D as Distress. The artist is a cartographer: his drawings are maps of a universe that unfolds for us like a journey that is both similar and different on each page. The succession of drawn sequences presents itself to our curiosity as the route of an endless voyage. But what we understand as we advance through this world in perpetual reconfiguration is that this space into which we are projected and which the artist invites us to explore, zone by zone, dangerously resembles a labyrinth with no exit: this world where every alley is a new visual adventure is actually a world with no outside. There are no dead ends because there is neither a center to the labyrinth nor a periphery: I can continue my path from line to line and from page to page, but if I get used to seeing space like these palimpsests, there is also no reason or way for me to get out: on the last sheet, I will have no choice but to retrace my steps back to the first, and so on.
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G as Garden. How can one conceive of the profusion of graphics, the extraordinary efflorescence of drawn forms, without imagining these pages as glimpses of an ancient jungle or as pages from a herbarium? The layering of the drawn areas evokes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the enclosures of early vegetable gardens: these fragments of vegetal exuberance that the pen draws with love and generosity transport us to the imagination of a primitive nature tamed by early agrarian civilizations: stone walls jealously guarding an oasis of greenery, a wealth of rare plants and flowers, clumps of green herbs, canals flowing with clear water, an abundance of shrubs with broad leaves laden with fruit, turquoise water basins… in short, something akin to what the Sumerians five thousand years ago called Eden. Birds alight there to sing. Terrestrial and aquatic animals of all kinds, including unknown species, live there and often seem to relax, gliding here and there among the legs of youthful bathers.
E as Erotic. The underlying text—the sexual body of the primary meaning—becomes visible only through brief and fleeting epiphanies. Yet it appears erotically here and there, in the slight openings of the graphic designs that clothe and cover it as if to hide its nakedness from us; and it presents enough interpretable traces for the eye to engage in the pleasure of deciphering the riddle: the relationship of amorous uncertainty between what was once plainly stated and what now presents itself for interpretation in the form of a purely plastic text, rich with its own indecipherable syntax. The graphics are drapings that clothe a body without underwear. The haute couture dress reveals the curve of a breast or the top of a thigh. Barthes warned us: “Isn’t the most erotic part of a body where the clothing gapes? It is the intermittency that is erotic: the skin shimmering between two pieces; it is the very shimmer that seduces or, in other words, the staging of an appearance/disappearance.”
M as Music. If the text of the works exposes us to the obligation of dreaming with our eyes open and if the flow of forms retains from the underlying text the hypothesis of a often linear arrangement, it happens that the eye, trying to discern the shapes and their sequence, loses the notion of the written page and textuality in favor of an entirely different tradition: that of the musical score and its staves covered with notes. For there is in these sheets such a presence of rhythm, such a marked insistence on scansion, and such a recurrent effect of canon or fugue that it becomes difficult to see anything other than the inscription of a powerful sound sequence or the notation of a melody ripped from the mists of time: a piece of symphony, an opera overture, a barbaric rhapsody, a Dionysian chorus… And if these pages were to be interpreted, as such, by a saxophonist skilled in improvisation?
A as Autograph. Every manuscript is a signature. What I write bears witness to my body, to the pulse of blood in my veins, to the rhythm of my breath, to the muscular strength of my hand, to the nerve impulses guiding my fingers. My way of writing is me. My way of drawing is too. As both manuscripts and graphic performances, these works that are both written and drawn are more than just signed; they are the very identity of the artist made visible in its two forms: in its rational dimension, which is that of the underlying writing, and in its dreamlike or delirious dimension, which is that of the obsessive graphics that invade and cover it like a tsunami of protean visions. But this double signature is also that of a true stratification: through the palimpsest, the self of the autograph cleaves into a dual instance that inscribes, within the self, the distance of strangeness and the depth of a bygone time.
I as Indecipherable. The beauty of the indecipherable is to confront the viewer with an aporia. This is probably text, a language, ideas, meaning: the forms I distinguish surely want to tell me something. And yet I understand nothing. I am faced with them like the Egyptologist in front of hieroglyphs before Champollion had deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Unable to read, I let my gaze explore the graphics, surrendering to the purely visual, that is to say, purely plastic pleasure of following the incantatory rhythm of the forms with my eyes. Knowing as well that my pleasure comes from the very uncertainty of what I see: is a coded message hidden from me? Or should I be content to admire its beauty and strangeness, letting them affect my sensibility? Yet these forms evoke analogical representations in me, a detail catches my eye, I shift my scale and see something else. Art does not consist of reflecting the visible but of making it visible.
E as Writing. To the alphabetical writing that constitutes the underlying pre-text of the work, the graphic work opposes and overlays what resembles neither figuration nor formal abstraction but rather an alternative form of writing, free from any indicia, independent of any system of encryption or code, and yet allowing the viewer to sketch out an indefinite plurality of possible relations between signifier, signified, and referent. This other writing is an interpretive engine: it induces spontaneous interpretations like Leonardo da Vinci’s blot. But the characteristic form of the graphics chosen by the artist, the ornamental structure and the meticulousness of the drawings, and the relationship these saturated lines establish with the almost immaterial traces of the French fragments, give rise to a phenomenon with few equivalents in the visual arts: the unsettling staging of a decisive dialogue between the East and the West. The genius of Kufic and Arabic calligraphy undoubtedly inhabits the performances of this writing, which refers to no specific language but carries with it the living memory of a vast written tradition.
L as Lines and Diamonds. The virtual lines, on which the underlying writing was freely aligned, were transparent and suspended in a kind of initial void that is the blank page. These lines, revived by the energy of the graphics, become real axes of force and fissures, structuring the upward or downward emergence of the new layer of plastic writing: between these lines that persist and materialize as an integral part of the drawing, unfold the rich friezes of a graphic performance where, as in Paul Klee’s work, there are both oblong shapes close to the visceral and the vegetal, sinusoidal lines, and some elementary geometric proposals, among which an abundance of triangles align like chains of mountains, overlap apex to apex like an hourglass, or add base to base to form diamonds. The triangle, a female symbol repeated endlessly, is everywhere: accompanied by the clitoral button, it evokes the omnipotence of the Great Goddess, the pleasure of fertility as depicted by the earliest anthropomorphic statuettes of Syro-Hittite art, but with a grace, finesse, and decorative lightness that belong only to the subtle spirit of Ottoman parchment.
Pierre-Marc de Biasi
