Enzo Patti

Enzo Patti - Apologies for lack of images - these will be included in the text, but have not been included as they are not yet available for download - better images will be uploaded. These have been taken to get a sense of the discussion.

Features:

1)    1) Asemic handwritten text

2)    2)Various printed matter as ground

Further correspondence with Enzo reveals that his current overwritten works are also executed on printed leaflets inserted into medicine boxes. Enzo hybridizes the text by inserting very small asemic writing with small characters making the prose more illegible whilst at the same time suggesting landscapes – the sea, sky, an ideal city. Measurements are varied and sometimes the sheets are glued together to create larger works – 30cmx120cm for example. He also makes use of “book pages if it is a beautiful paper, other times I buy beautiful watercolor paper of 300 grams, large sheets up to 100 cm or even more”.

“I like to try all the inks on all the papers I come across ...”.

He also states that he uses only blue and purple inks on these works. Enzo has been drawing a lot and not painting as much as he used to because his health has not be good. “The drawing is lighter for my current physical condition. But I plan to  go back to painting very soon”. The following information is taken from an interview to be found on:

https://segnonline.it/intervista-enzo-patti/?amp

In 1980 Enzo began (what I understand to be) a theme named the "tourist guide" which became the pretext to continuously draw-write (1*) Di Capperi, a fantastic city, a rediscovered city, whose unknown alphabet appeared in the first two pages of the book in the form of large stone sculptures and in the following pages engraved or in bas-relief on the archaeological finds. It simplified itself, however, until it consisted of only four signs: the vertical, the oblique, the horizontal dash and the arc from time to time, ultimately becoming a fake text that accompanies the pseudo illustrations of the books painted in trompe l'oeil. Whether open on real wooden lecterns and old school desks, or walls of buildings on which doors and windows open, as in my innumerable painted woods sections, or fragments of inscriptions on illusory stones set in the realizations of vast wall decorations, until finally (the writing became) plains, seas, roads and squares as in the recent series of “asemic landscapes”.

Enzo’s text is called “fake writing, indecipherable writing, calligraphic, pseudo-writing, cryptic ...

Mirella Bentivoglio called it "asemantic" in 1998, on the occasion of the exhibition she curated at the Cuba d’oro (Rome) and at the Seagull (La Spezia). In fact, in his work there are often, alongside glyphs and apparently alphabetic traces, drawings and human or animal figures - as in a sort of illegible encyclopedia (not so far from Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, perhaps). Enzo said:    “ my research is definitely oriented towards the construction of images that mix symbols, immediately recognizable or not (2*) (but always with an unclear meaning) to asemic writing. At times, it is true, the writing seems to comment on the images or vice versa the images seem to be the illustrations of an asemic text - an operation not too far from Serafini's Codex - but the game that I pursue and more interesting for me is the construction of images in which drawing and writing are truly inseparable (3*). The "asemic landscapes" are perhaps among my best results. They are evidence of the coexistence of different languages: asemic writing (which suggests a possible reading and evokes a possible sound), the bird's-eye perspective (which distances writing and at the same time magnifies it), human silhouettes (coming from ancient Egyptian alphabet to indicate actions) and all-round bodies (volumes and “non-volumes”) with improbable dimensions and which seem to belong to distant, past or future times.  

 

Later on in the interview Enzo was asked this question: “your impression is that - completely disregarding asemic writing - the path of verbal-visual research (even fully semantic) has been interrupted or greatly reduced, in recent decades, in Italy? The reference is mainly to concrete poetry and visual poetry.

Yes, I "think" so. I think it has greatly reduced not only in Italy but also outside. I believe, therefore, in the total absence of certain proofs (4*).

 

Comments: 

(1*) “continuously draw-write”: When one thinks of the ‘practitioners’ of prose, there are as many sorts of prose as there are practitioners. Think Sir Walter Raleigh or Hobbes, James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Prose “could be defined as the sum of stylistic features determined by a familiar set of conceptual operators: form, genre, author, period, or literary fashion” (John Guillory).  However, all these elements are in and of themselves “conceptual” – raw materials in the production of prose and its compositional and language structure. This means, prose has its own set of complexities. 

 

To me, Enzo Patti has formulated an integrated prose system grounded in his visual approach to indecipherable words. Enzo’s ‘draw-write’ is  asemic in execution, but his approach opens up a new way of structuring the formal elements of visual prose interpretation. For example, when viewing  Enzo’s pages against works such as The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet* by author Reif Larsen, notice the difference in stylistic approach.  Throughout Larsen’s book, the author has created sketches and maps, developed by his character T.S., who through these images explores and settles himself in the world around him. He appears to ‘map’ everything – even items/objects/places one would consider impossible to map.   Enzo on the other hand integrates his illustrations - 'maps'  - by creating them with and by the text. The images are formed by and find their gestural articulation through the density, complexity or alternatively loose spacing created by his meticulous hand writing. 

 

*https://booksnooks.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/the-selected-works-of-t-s-spivet-by-reif-larsen/

(2*) “construction of images that mix symbols, immediately recognizable or not”: in the short list of definitions I stated that whether or not the text was executed in ‘asemic’ writing, that remained part of the ‘how’ – not the why. Yes, Enzo deliberately uses asemic writing in a way which allows us to ‘read’ his diagrammatic illustrations as prose. We are called to decipher his prose as an ancient language of harmonious rhetoric, our penetrating gaze never quite finding the meaning behind his stories. 

(3*) but the game that I pursue and more interesting for me is the construction of images in which drawing and writing are truly inseparable: truly inseparable drawing and writing? Absolutely! In an era where all structures are being torn down, a time of linguistic exasperation, that is, a keen awareness of, but also of excessive exploitation of the whole apparatus that regulates the constraints of prose and poetry, together with all it’s modifications, some artists interrogate the old paths in new ways, remaining respectful to the modifications of language without destroying/ totally ‘deconstructing’ it’s boundaries. 

(4*)Yes, I "think" so. I think it has greatly reduced not only in Italy but also outside. I believe, therefore, in the total absence of certain proofs: I’m not exactly certain what Enzo was meaning by this, and certainly there has been MUCH written on asemic writing with many meaningful discussions by those theoretically engaged with this art form, but, I have lately found quite a few artists who are no longer satisfied with the umbrella vispo – their work has nothing to do with the poetic text-image, rather they are telling stories and writing narratives, with visual elements integrated into and with the prose text, images weaving themselves with and from the text.