Ink on paper / 2015 – ongoing

In order: Roll a cigarette / The cloud / The candle / The hand / The clock / Drink a glass of water / Exhibition room supervision / Sweep the floor / Open the door / Apparent sun trajectory in Norther hemisphere.

Le langage des choses/The language of things is a series of drawings started in 2016. The graphic signs translate gestures, ordinary objects, interactions, and scientific phenomena into a graphic and symbolic language, based on a sequential grid.

The boards are based on the same structure: a title and its deployment in nine squares. The last square of the grid often coincides with the title: the meaning of the graphic signs is built up step by step. Reading the signs becomes a game of interpretation, designed to guess the subject of the drawing.

The Language of Things is the fruit of research into asemic writing, a form of writing devoid of semantic content. Undecipherable, asemic lies between text and image, drawing and writing. The act of writing itself becomes the center of this practice in which the process is an end in itself, to the detriment of writing role as a vehicle of information.

This research follows the tradition of the verbo-visual work of 1970s artists such as Mirella Bentivoglio, Irma Blank, and Maria Lai. Asemic writing is a means of questioning the relationship between language and power, writing and the law, hand writing and technology. To make writing illegible is to deprive it of its informative value, to de-technologize it, thus revealing its presence as graphic material.

Now comprising over 100 boards, the drawings from Le langage des choses have been exhibited in various international contexts such as Centre d’Art Contemporain in Genève, as part of the exhibition Scrivere Disegnando, 2019 / Wopart International – Drawing on paper fair with Rizomi Arte gallery, Lugano, 2021 / Art Verona, represented by Rizomi Arte gallery / CONCRETA. Festapoesia, Accademia d’Ungheria, Rome, 2018 / Avant la lettre, Espace KL8, Bruxelles, 2022.