BEFORE THE BEGINNING – 27 MAY – 12 JUNE 2016 | Nuart Gallery | Santa Fe, New Mexico

Internationally renowned artist Cecil Touchon creates elegant abstractions derived from the typographical tradition.  Employing collage and paint, Touchon’s practice seamlessly merges ephemera with partial curvilinear letterforms, reminiscent of the early 20th century Constructivist and Synthetic Cubist movements.

In this solo exhibition, it is the artist’s intent to deconstruct both the “word” and the “letter” so as to distill a more primordial form.  The artist burnishes the painted surface, exposing earlier layers of paper and paint that could serve as a metaphor associated with a timeline of life on earth.

“If “In the beginning was the Word”, then before the beginning were the letters and before the letters were the forms forming. My work continues to be focused on what one might call the poetics of the pre-lingual or perhaps post-literal or the asemic. These are terms being bantered around and experimented with in avant-garde poetry the last few years. In my own case I am driven by the idea of expressing the realm of the non-verbal. As a poet I have moved the surface from the printed page to the painted panel. I have deconstructed the word to the letters and the letters to the forms. It is from these parts that I construct my poetry which is entirely visual and depends on the visual to explore meaning at a sub-letteral level; a silent realm of becoming where words have not yet taken form.” Cecil Touchon

see exhibition page at Nuart Gallery