Page 6 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

been absorbed or modified by the surfaces, this is how A piece like EarlySongs (2010) (page19) with its bold vertical
they loom before us, so that scripts recall their implicit narrowing of linearity, though lacking colour, covers a wide
muteness of figure or visual patinas hinting at hidden spectrum of textual effects. Serial numbers indicating not
junctures of sound. just a working day but a time of day are put in sequence with
words further atomised between dashes and slowly reorder-
As we peer among and between minutely codified traits ing themselves, while a sprinkling of neologisms separated
we discern that the surface they emerge from is not an by colons drift into the shorthand sections, where questions
impermeable glaze but more like a projective, multi-cellular of precise decoding become acute. What Lewty implicates
sponge here inflated, there crushed. An openness to partici- across such a texture of written or print-like effects is some-
pation is not subverted but held in reserve, what recedes thing like a‘counter-looming’of what is being absorbed
before us enables rescued exclamations or declarations between scripts or underneath them so that an intermittent
to process across a clouded presence of surfaces saturated trail of prophetic declarations in small capitals can project
in traces of arrival if not recovery.The burden of words can’t through the flux of textures: ELYSIUM, PRELUDE, ENACT,
be thrown off lightly, Lewty has observed and he has the FEAST, FACE, MASKS. Should this be read in series or not?
patience to ask where their meanings go; one might add, Do they play amongst themselves or are they more radically
how are they, or what percentage of them, gets absorbed, absorbed by all the other moments of writing into being
as either taken up or lost? no more than single and isolated exclamations?

Mutations of absorption are also present in Lewty’s more A refrain-like, constantly permuting and re-atomising word-
recent preoccupation with shorthand. On one level, the series,‘at the edge of the park–where the grass ends–
compendious code invented by Thomas Shelton which endless heat begins’turns into its shorthand equivalent
Lewty deploys resembles random graphic slashes, squiggles as one demarcation is absorbed (apparently unrecognisably)
and dots, but these are the marks of a given encryption by another but with an abrupt change in the graphic traits
which are being followed exactly. This is not an asemic involved. At times, the shorthand patterns suggest grass-
improvisation but a systematic collation of motivated marks like fronds or strands as if figuring the park-theme with
though they remain‘unlettered’. Through them can be startling literalness. What is happening across the whole
sensed the internal distances or feints of signification rather piece is an array of ratios and rhythms of absorption, oper-
than a pure absence: as they disguise the overt such recon- ating on several levels, so that the work becomes opaque
dite signs negotiate planes of recession and depth as part or re-emerges before our eyes, where we are not just an
of the linearity that proceeds across the surface. onlooker but a reader and potential decoder.