Page 7 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

Healing Surface (2013) (page 9) consists of a thin sheet of surface waves.There is also some direct figurative play
paper with washed-out oil pastel colourings on its reverse between letter-shapes and shorthand marks through
put twice through a typewriter to create overlapping scripts alignment. The V of WAVES is mirrored in a shorthand /\
together with handwriting added in pencil.This had been just above it which spells the indefinite article‘a’and this
thrown away as a failure but was rediscovered some years leads to an inverse back-slanting S (meaning‘joy’) which
later and relaid on white card after being protected by a layer crowns the S ofWAVES so that the eye can make out an
of tissue, given its now fragile state. Marks of original neglect elegant curlicue pattern.These are intimate juxtapositions
and damage have eloquently worked into the now rough- rather than motifs: not so much overlappings as underlying
ened surface, so that frayed gaps lighten the overall textures lappings-against allowed to take on a role.
as well as interrupting them, and the underlying grey-pink
colour looms out from reversals to recoveries more like In this scenario marks get washed up on a surface, and may
a forward-moving horizon of anticipation than a retrospec- partly filter through it so as to be rudimentarily retained
tive one. In Counter-Movements (2011) layering results from upon it (rather like the thin film effect known as adsorption).
a fold-over technique. Linear writing appears to anticipate A‘tidal line’between the two effects is constantly shifting,
what it has not yet spelled itself out as becoming when so depositing and dissolving and this takes us to the heart
overlaid in reverse, and this can create surprising (uninten- of Lewty’s imaginative concerns, one no less arising from his
tional) symmetrical juxtapositions of individual letters as frequent sorties along the Swanage foreshore. How to read
a result of the mirror effect. Chance is allowed to create or regard such marks passaging through the inscriptional?
its own encounters, so that‘summer’from left to right is com- Are they marks to be reassimilated or, as beyond recovery,
plemented by the deflected letters of‘season’from right to are they tokens of the very textures they have soaked into?
left.Where tangles of mirrored and unmirrored letters occur In their presence one may feel, inThomas A Clark’s phrase,
they seem to suggest a prototype shorthand of their own. ‘the lure of a trajectory/you will not take’. However, as we
linger before these semi-pervious, quasi-graphic messages,
Spring: Insistence of Waves (2012) (page 11) displays a more their shimmering encodings or saturate fade-outs haunt us.
open flowing texture with fresh coloration but with a clear Our own failure to translate them fully no longer feels
vertical channel between the wavy configurations on the left distracting as they draw out what can be absorbed from
and segments of the title in italic capitals on the right which ourselves into a concrete relation with layers embedding/
become transposed and thematically elaborated in short- projecting the encumbered circulations and speculations
hand. Among the waves are under-currents of apical forma- of proto-indicative surfaces.
tions suggestive of the way a tidal flow filtrates through
Peter Larkin
Kenilworth, 2012