ART CITIES:London-Writings on the Wall

The exhibition “Writings on the Wall” examines the significant influence of ancient and contemporary graffiti on the practice of a group of mid-20th-Century artists, who question the status quo and the power structures found within societies and studied the ways in which ideas and speech have been communicated and recorded through inscriptions on the communal walls of the urban environment.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Waddington Custot Gallery Archive

The artists selected for the exhibition “Writings on the Wall” share an interest in ghettoised or so-called derivative art forms, developed outside the structures of art institutions. They are connected by a specific focus on calligraphic gesture and textual writing and employ certain characters, signs and symbols to emulate a mutual graphic language used to express human experience. Brassaï captured strangers’ scrawls and engravings on the buildings and walls of Paris over a period of three decades from the 1930s to the 60s as part of an extensive photography project. He approached the modern graffiti of Paris like an urban ethnologist, classifying signs and symbols, aligning it with older graffiti such as that of ancient Rome and prehistoric cave petroglyphs. In 1944, Brassaï’s work was encountered by Jean Dubuffet who in the following year produced a series of lithographs, to accompany a book of poetry by Eugène Guillevic. The lithographs celebrate the wall’s spontaneously recorded traces of love, hate, humour and self-assertion as a testimony to humanity’s lived experience. Dubuffet began to research and collect the work of marginalised groups making art on the fringes of society including the insane, folk and ‘primitive’ artists. Many of his later works embrace raw emotive scrawling and are composed with wall ‘matter’, mimicking rough city walls. Brassaï’s photographs were also influential to Antoni Tàpies who became aware of the existentialist theories which accompanied the reception of Brassaï’s work in 1950s Paris. Tàpies transposed the function of city walls onto his densely texured canvases, often marking them with raw graffiti gestures, crosses, ‘X’s and ritual and territoril marks. After a childhood disrupted by political turmoil, as Spain was cast between intermittent civil war and military dictatorship, Tapies’ understanding of walls as witnesses to martyrdoms and suffering reflects their role in the battleground between propaganda and protest, and their importance to personal declaration in the shared public realm. Also included in the exhibition are works from Vlassis Caniaris’ series, “Homage to the Walls of Athens 1941–19…” (1959), a palimpsest of sacking, wax and cloth saturated with whitewash plaster in which we see fragmentary hand-painted letters – including the letter E, for Eleftheria (freedom), for Ellás (Greece), for EAM, the National Liberation Front, the main movement of the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation during World War II. The series directly reference the walls of a city in turmoil. Reflecting Caniaris’ experience of the civil war following the occupation of Greece during the Second World War, the works communicate the artist’s concern for political freedom, resistance and social welfare. Caniaris stated explicitly that his assemblages were intended to re-create the image as well as the feeling or impression of the walls of occupied Athens. Manolo Millares, who became closely aligned with Tàpies, was particularly interested in the archaeological record of pre-historic symbols and cave paintings. As a young boy, visiting the local Museo Canario in Las Palmas, Millares learnt of the cave petroglyphs and burial pits of the Guanches, a Neolithic people indigenous to the Canary Islands. For Millares, the ancient text and modern automatic writing held and harvested authentic meaning, and in the early 1950s, he began to inscribe calligraphic gestures and signs onto his canvases, reconciling pre-historic cave painting and European Surrealist automatism. In the early 1950s, Cy Twombly would undertake a number of trips across Europe and North Africa, and the ancient graffiti he encountered would inspire him throughout his career toward a deep appreciation for mark-making in all its forms. Twombly pulls together a wide range of references from Roman classical mythology and poetry, to isolated alphabet letters, the elemental signs of crosses, further reduced geometric shapes, and the meaningless line. In these works, language is deconstructed, emphasising the formal aspects of text and the performative act of writing itself.

Info: Waddington Custot, 11 Cork Street, London, Duration 17/5-30/6/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-16:00, www.waddingtoncustot.com