Meessen De Clercq Gallery is pleased to present Mar Arza’s work for the first time in Belgium, in an exhibition where she explores submerged language arising from the interlines, as this blank space in between text that allows second readings and hidden meanings.
Arza’s oeuvre comprises an intense debate around visual and material dimensions of language. Through the use of books —as objects, as containers, as metaphors— she establishes a dialogue with the written text in order to break the rigid linearity of its format, and therefore to widen the concept of what it is thought as a book. If language forms thought, freeing the limits of language in every single direction will increase the scope of thought.
A meticulous sculpting procedure of cutting overcomes then the task of selecting and reassembling words as embodied pieces of text. Language transmutes into malleable material subject to construct new meanings outside the pages of a book.
Gradually, she has concentrated on voids left in the book more than words themselves, as a need to attend silence among the excess of speech. The exhibition at Meessen De Clercq Gallery departs from this point, the absence of text, and reflects on the significant value and meaningful symbolism ascribed to void, to blank spaces, to the cavities of language that hide the recesses of feelings.
Void is understood as a relevant space in between words, in between lines, and it is unfold to the stage of elucidating a score of intimate silences.
In the series Desiertos cicatriz… pages are aligned as if they were fragments of a landscape where the interline in the only element composing the horizon. Interlines have been displayed consecutively as the only possible text. The landscape of words transforms into a desert of silence that allows only to read intuitions. An horizon of events where signifiers have been absorbed while the vestiges of the letters are left, slightly arising from the still of the line.
A closer look reveals that these remnants articulate a dance of little typographic traces resembling a choreographic display of notes in a score.
A question is raised about the location of missed, cut, interrupted, censored, ceased or elided passages… And the sign of the title refers to this concealment (…). A symbol wide enough to host silenced bits, a threshold where through the text disappears or emerges as metaphorical eyelids that retain the delightful echo of remembrance.
A limbo might be situated over the other side of these brackets. (…). A limbo that hosts what it is unsaid. An embraced home in between two covers. An abode of suspense. That is to say, a book. A book of entrails.
The landscape of interlines seems to cicatrise the wound of misunderstanding. Furthermore, the interlines suggest the prelude of novel graphs, because it happens that, by chance, some of the left typographies concord in punctual moments and draw new and different signs. These coincidences are sudden and subtle harmonies, seeds to a new alphabet.
The Inventory has the aim of collecting and classifying these new calligraphies. Methodically documented in hundreds of photographic files; some of them are selected and arranged as an intend to set a possible catalogue of new letters (or inter-letters).
Various of these suggestive inter-letters, coming from the interlines, have been materialised in metal types. The characters have been shaped in relief, modelled in wax and cast in silver, so that what was mere hypothesis has become real.
These types are finally used to compose a new text indented in the surface of a paper as much as a scar is to the skin.
A whole circle is completed, from the remains of the inter-text to an alphabet of chance, to a text again.
A sprout of expression out of the meaningful blanks of a page. A void so completely filled with so real a presence…
C’est-à-dire...