Thoughts on printed words by artist and writer Sudas
…like S., who keeps going back on his commitments. For instance, when it comes to writing, S. had convinced himself it would be better to let it go, to avoid it – and yet… barely three days have passed and we’re back to square one and S. is writing about himself – in the third person…
…it’s well known to most people, though it took him a long time to realise it, that painting can play with meaning like a cat with a mouse, and that, in the end, it’s no tragedy if meaning fades away and what remains, bare and blunt, is a signifier – even a disoriented one. It doesn’t matter.
The word, by contrast, lives on meaning, and cannot stand on the signifier alone…
…the word may carry a meaning within itself, but it can rarely stand on its own, even when dressed up in Bodoni typeface; it needs to relate to other words, and from that promiscuity meaning must be born – otherwise there is absolute emptiness.
…the fact is that S. has a strange perception of reality…
…S. doesn’t just read, he looks; he looks at the written page and, between the lines, on the lines, within the lines, he seems to glimpse the essence of the author…
…the aesthetics of the page, in a visual sense, which has no connection to the content of the narrative, nor to its form.
With some effort, S. excludes, bypasses, the meaning that all those letters constitutionally carry and concentrates on the weave – a textile metaphor – on the texture of the composition of the printed characters…
…particularly he’s drawn to the O’s and the M’s, for reasons unknown…
…yes, punctuation could just as well not be there – in fact, it bothers him; not to mention apostrophes and accents…
…and yet there are words that prevent him from seeing the page as if it were a carpet, and instead attract him, forcing him to read them…
…recently he came across two words: UOMINI CORALLO (coral men), and he could not help but read the story…
…as he read, he looked at the letters – especially the O’s – and they seemed to him like portals to a world he did not know, a world both amiable and unsettling… chthonic, one might say, subaqueous, underwater…
…the two words referred to certain beings, protagonists of painted panels, who carry on themselves copious coral branches – but not only that: shells too, bivalves and gastropods…
…once it was clear that the coral branched out from their body, partially concealing it, he wondered what kind of coral it might be: it looked very much like the red coral, known as corallium rubrum…
…the letters belonged to the font family known as Bodoni, named after the typographer who designed it in the eighteenth century, with feet called ‘serifs’, vertical in relation to the main body, which would suggest a certain hardness, and yet the perception is one of lightness and elegance…
…the bodies, clad in coral, do not seem to suffer from the presence of the cnidarians (the group the corals belong to); on the contrary, they display a certain pride – one might even say, nobility – in their posture…
…S. doesn’t know what to look at: the letters or the hybrids? He decides to look at both colonies and to suspend judgement on the appropriateness of certain forms of coexistence…
…after all, he has always been a supporter of inclusion – a very trendy word; only, he doesn’t know who is including whom: the human including the coral, or the other way around?
Faced with the responsibility of this choice, he returns to the letters and words stripped of meaning. There are still some worth looking at, such as PROFONDAMENTE (deeply), with the A standing out between the two O’s and the two E’s…
…he decides not to fall again for the fascination of the meaning. He will remain attached to the signifier and to the emptiness it carries with it… but he is asking himself:
if a little branch of coral breaks, who will feel the pain?
Artwork by Sudas (Sandro Beltramo) – Text translated from Italian by Osho News
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