Tomas Schmit
Michael Werner | New York
The distance between a line and a line of words is vast, yet the semiotic flames of language regularly overleap that gulf to singe purely visual marks. Even when relatively well integrated, as in paintings by Edward Ruscha, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, words can menace the composition of which they should be but a feature among features. Or consider the best work of Jenny Holzer or Maya Lin, in which, the pictorial having been abandoned altogether, text is essentially wall-to-wall and respect for the consuming power of language amounts to ceding to it entirely.
A founding member of the Fluxus movement,