about
artist statement:
My work is a conversation between a love of lingual spontaneity and a frustration with the rigidity and permanence of the written word. The fluidity of the spoken word contrasts sharply with written text and this tension drives my process to defamiliarise and re-articulate for an approaching post-literate world.
Influenced by asemic writing, urban reclamation, redaction and calligraffiti, I deconstruct traditional calligraphic and typographic structures learned in my past, questioning the relationship between reader and text.
bio tldr:
Words. I have spent my life working with words. I studied words. I wrote words. I designed words. I painted words. And now I spurn them.
I am an artist based in the UK and my practice focuses on my love/hate relationship with language using traditional lettering and calligraphic techniques combined with a deconstructed digital composition process.
This exploration of the use of communication stems from my background. In the late 1990s, I founded a design agency in London and ran this for ten years, working with large corporate clients. In 2011, I began an artist practice (under a different name) taking words onto the streets of London. Over twelve years, this distinctive art has featured in numerous exhibitions.
During the Covid lockdowns, I experienced a lack of faith in the communication business and I began experimenting with non-semantic, post-literate writing. Realising this work needs a life of its own, I now concentrate on a new, largely digital practice under the name altgnon.
<CV link>
bio in depth:
The story behind my art takes me from typography student, to accessible designer, to street artist, to fine artist and finally to post-literate artist.
I was always fascinated by letters and typography. I was taught to read via a progressive system called the Initial Teaching Alphabet. The ITA was developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of a system of shorthand) and it included 26 letters of the Roman alphabet and an extra 14 characters to represent sounds such as ‘oo’ and ‘th’. It left its mark on me but I’m not sure it helped my reading.
At college, I studied letterforms, along with graphic art and signwriting. I admired the post-modern deconstructions of David Carson and Neville Brody. Over the years, I veered away from design and have slowly gravitated towards the disintegration of communication.
As much as I love letters, I am increasingly drawn to William Burroughs’s idea of language being a ‘virus from outer space’. We struggle with language. It’s inherently limited and limiting. For example, if I say I am something, the implication is that I am only that, and also that I am permanently that. Today’s world is more fluid. On X (Twitter) the other day, someone stated that ‘text is a bad medium’ for some types of communication. That made me smile.
We also live in the age of ‘fake news’, where language is increasingly misused to spread powerful lies—always read between the lines folks. So, I followed a line from Ed Ruscha to Jasper Johns to Cy Twombly, and ultimately came to unreadable text.
From Zhang Xu, through Cecil Touchon to Jim Leftwich, I see a fit with the tolerant, global language of asemic writing and web3. So, in Sept 2022, I began a new web3 career, decontructing, obfuscating and writing unreadable text. Asemic promises no fake answers. Asemic tells no lies. Asemic allows time and space to think.
Since 2011, I have worked as a street artist/fine artist and I have exhibited regularly. I would like my new digital work to sit separately, hence the anonymity and a new name. This is for two reasons. Firstly, my physical art is different. It looks different and it carries a different message. Yes, there are connexions, but these will remain personal to me for now. Secondly, I am entranced by the web3 space and my digital work is directly influenced by the empowering and democratic nature of the decentralised space—and the anonymity afforded by it.
Partly due to my street art background, my digital work often balances urgent post-literate gestures with a time-eroded patina and a personal shorthand, an echo of street tags over layers of street wall texture.
I am delighted to be a part of the Flannel Collective and was in the sixth cohort of the Vertical Crypto Art Residency in 2023.
@altgnon
2024