One of the most interesting aspects of drawing, its the connection with language. Language is drawing, and drawing is language. Not only because drawing is a language in itself, with its set of rules, but also because in historical terms language was created after drawing. This means that, in Paleolithic terms, men would create drawings and paintings out of the world around him, and only afterwards language was created. In the beginning, language was a collection of symbols/pictograms and only afterwards language, as we know it today – an abstracted code of symbols was invented. For this reason, some of the letters of the latin alphabet were created after physical objects. For instance, the letter ‘A’ comes from the Phoenician alphabet ‘Aleph’, which in turn was inspired in the horn of a ‘ox’.
During my studies in drawing, last year, I created a lot of experiments in drawing/language, as a form of expanding my knowledge on these two fields. I was interested on how language can be expressed through drawing, and on how drawing impacts our understanding of language. All letters are drawn, of course. And drawing the letters – the so called – handwriting is one of the activities that may impact long and short-term memory.
For artists, the possibilities of playing with language and drawing and endless. Thus, I tried to experiment with visual poetry, one of the most interesting forms of translating drawing into language. The rhythm, form and aesthetics of language, can be perfectly matched with the imagination, fantasy and plasticity of drawing.
One of my collaborations was the project ‘The Little Book of Germany’, an artist book and video, created together with the visual artist Albert Barbu, which plays with the potential of language as an open system, which conveys endless meanings, associations and systems. This new project will finally be produced in 2019, after the incubator year of 2019. More soon…
