Page 15 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

of italic imitating a typeface is set above the harder-to-read symbolic system and put it to use. Now his works become
flourishes of the‘Secretary’script of the pre-modern age. more perfect doubles. Divided vertically or horizontally,
Some kind of identity in difference seems to be proposed as on one side he inscribes his dream-like narrative in longhand,
each half of the work–top and bottom–is equal, though the on the other–or below–he transcribes the same text into
scripts are different in scale and therefore of different length. Shelton’s shorthand.We may guess that these dashes and
ligatures stand for words but can only look at them not read
2009 brings us to the earliest works in the current exhibition. them; and this mode of looking at the mark reacts back on
The symmetrical wings of a moth, by chance pressed like our looking at the other side of the equation, the columns of
a flower to the page above the red lines of TextwithaMoth, longhand.When Shelton’s tachygraphy first became popular
might be the secret logo of the new visual regime.The bilat- poems were written in praise of a system that allowed people
eral symmetry of wings is enlarged and asserted more force- to write as fast as speech. In his teens Lewty was a gifted clar-
fully in the double folds of TextoveraSpillage, in which the inettist and student of music theory. Scanning these recent
stains resemble the inkblots used in the Rorschach psycho- works one becomes aware of the beauty of the varying tempi
logical test. As with the set of Rorschach blots, Lewty’s sym- of majuscules and cursive script, and of the quicker tempo
metrical spillage evokes the essential symmetry of the body of the succession of Shelton’s symbols.They bear some resem-
and its internal organs. In conversation Simon has expressed blance to musical notation. As in the earlier inscriptions, the
his interest in the intra-uterine memory. Looking at Textover texts often evoke sounds, breath and voices, but always in par-
a Spillage, with its red capillaries lined up as words over the adoxical fashion: in The Real within the Voice we are teased
symmetrical stain, we seem to be simultaneously inside and by the passage,‘The world is full of voices I will never hear–
outside the body, confronting something at once familiar or writing I will never read’; and near the centre of This Sleep,
and unknown. Somatic and linguistic, these markings materi- this Fair, this Finding is inscribed‘UNSAYABLE’. One recent
alized upon a surface quietly refuse the Cartesian dualism drawing entitled Notations from a Script for a Phonetic Play
of body and mind. presents Shelton’s symbols lying over cursive graphite marks
that gesture towards script but remain illegible.
Simon Lewty was, as ever, on the lookout for strategies to
turn attention from language as meaning towards language From visible music and voices unheard we turn to a distinctive
as mark when he came across the system of stenography or feature of many of the recent works, their alternations of
shorthand invented in the 17th-century byThomas Shelton colour.The inscriptions are patterned by changes of coloured
and employed by that tireless diarist, observer and recorder inks, including red, orange, azure and indigo, violet and green.
of himself and his world, Samuel Pepys. Simon acquired Sometimes each letter or each symbol is in a different hue,
a facsimile of Shelton’s book Tachygraphy, practised its sometimes each word. Is colour sayable? Searching for rhyme