Page 14 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

The Surface Speaks

For 40 years Simon Lewty has walked a solitary road towards subordinate to object, nor the name to what it designated,
doubling.What were once elusive pairs–figurative image rather they coexisted in alliance. In this embodiment, word
beside word, freehand scratches and scrawls set against ele- is image, a thing in the world. In the catalogue Lewty wrote
gant chancery script–have become in the recent work a more of his childhood excitement at discovering the names of crys-
deliberate duplication, a more formal doubling. Back in the tals and other minerals he had just seen:‘Erythrite,Vanadinite,
1980s Lewty’s works often resembled maps. Map and the Cassiterite, Celestine, Orpiment, Fluorspar, Galena–names
world it mapped formed a pair, yet the map took its place as refulgent to the imagination as the glowing rocks were
in the world. By the end of that decade his drawings often to the senses’.
resembled diptychs, but ones in which the logic of dexter
and sinister was unclear; they were riddles without answer. Through the early 1990s inscribed words, pictograms and
The texts speak of hope and fear in the same breath. figures shared the same field, entering into alliance or jostling
for space. Often they lay over one another like in a palimpsest.
A significant landmark on Lewty’s progress was his engage- As the turn of the millennium approached the figures went
ment by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1989 to into hiding. A new formality appeared in the layout and the
present an exhibition selected from their enormously varied blocks of script were now more ordered within their margins;
collections of ethnography, natural history and–of course– the lines became longer and texts run on and on, without
paintings, drawings and prints. Time and again Lewty’s beginning and without end. New alternations pattern the
ChosenObjects teased the visitor into considering the status field; phrases in classical majuscules peremptorily interrupt
of thing, representation and word, or material object and sign. the flow of the cursive script. In the larger works this formality
I recall exhibit number 107, a specimen from the natural strengthened over the next decade, almost as if the menace
history collection, Hippospongiaequinameanderiformis, where in the text was being kept in check, brought into line.Words
a small hand-written tag, inscribed‘extinct 1938’, lay on top march to a stricter order. Around 2008 Lewty was increasingly
of the sponge. Here, as in Lewty’s own paintings, several of configuring another form of diptych, divided horizontally
which were included in the show, words were superimposed rather than vertically, in which one block of text is distin-
or embedded within the image or object. Label was not guished from another by a change of script.Typically a variant