Encrypted Alphabet, 2001

oil on mylar

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In this version of my anthropomorphic alphabet, all reference to letters and to human figures has been abandoned, leaving only the scaffolding of my image base behind.

These were painted over and on the back of black crayon studies executed in search of a simplified vocabulary of forms for my set of alphabet images, although rotated, inverted, or reversed. Recognition of the letter itself is no longer of consequence, replaced, instead, by the recognition of a diagram holding a particular place within the overall set of images.  The power of the letter to conjure the presence of an unseen named entity has been displaced by the power of the visual entity itself, a reverse evolution from phonetic sign, to pictograph, to object in the world.