Asemic dialogue

Asemic dialogue

Focusing on the practice of encounters, ODRADEK invites Japanese artist Aika Furukawa and Belgian artist Philip Wittmann to exhibit their drawn signs together. Both artists use inks and brushes in a way that corresponds to their individual cultural background.

From one wall to the other of the gallery, ideographic and alphabetic writings, intended to stir our imagination, are transformed into illegible abstract strokes.

Starting from the observation that machine-printed language has facilitated our aptitude for a certain reading habit, we decipher handwriting with increasing difficulty, an evolution that has been confirmed since the intensive use of computers. With this fact in mind, we can now focus on its counterpart, asemic writing. Totally unrelated to illiteracy, this type of handwriting is illegible and manifests itself more in the spirit of a refusal of semantic content. Instead of mocking the lack of legibility of certain calligraphies, let’s rejoice in the fact that we’re being led towards different modes of interconnection, preventing us from wanting to codify everything.

Drawn writings express themselves first and foremost as a sensual act. It affects our five senses and positions us in our relationship to the world, because by leaving free space for strokes, it remains connected to the traces that we find abundantly in nature.

Let’s take a look at Aika Furukawa’s graphic signs, full of changes and active undulations. Combined with ocean currents, the ebb and flow of waves or the wind in tree branches, they allow us to appreciate eternal cosmic movements. Aika Furukawa’s work is based on the changes and variations of nature, that is to say, on what manifests impermanence and even imperfections linked to the spontaneous breath of organic life. The Japanese artist’s graphic expression is asymmetrical, rhythmic and linked to the presence of emptiness. Fully aware and contemplative of nature, Aika Furukawa feels close to Western Art Nouveau, and more particularly to Victor Horta, with whom she shares the vital energy of the plant world.

Happy to share his research into the art of the stroke, Philip Wittmann offers us a personal lexicon that has its origins in the earliest Greek alphabetic characters. Starting from a cultural background at the antipodes of extreme Eastern aesthetics, his graphic art takes a symmetrical approach to the sign that implies systematic reasoning. As a result, the artist likes to frame his work. But paradoxically, that which exists in a state of ‘becoming’ within the limits of the frame overflows! Philip Wittmann’s invented writing doesn’t clash with any angle. Without rigidity, it develops at the whim of a free wrist.

So, from different horizons, two artists meet and exchange points of view, i.e., their degree of dependence as well as their freedom in relation to the foundations of their “education”.

Both have abandoned figuration and conventional writing to reveal their inner inspiration. They evoke, invoke and remind us of the magic of the art of the stroke.

Translation Renaat Beheydt