between the lines · a semiotic exploration of pictorial writing

I do not entirely agree with the approach based on the poetics of the fragment proposed in almost all the critical writing on Edith Urban’s art. In my opinion, it is more appropriate to look at the profound nature of the pictorial text than the evident intrusions of writing. So whilst the source of the phrase cited is essential, more than the phrase itself, what is important is the pictorial nature of what is written, its calligraphy, which is a particular variant of painting. The graffito technique, a form belonging to the ontogeny of the discipline of painting, gives the writing the status of an inscription. There can be various reasons for the idea of writing on a pictorial text, some of which I shall mention here. In ancient art, the purpose of writing was to accompany an image in order to commemorate its subject by enumerating that person’s qualities and virtues. In its relationship to the image, writing assumed the responsibility of authenticating the subject’s features if they were too generic, in accordance with the hierarchy of the formal values applied to art. The function of the inscription in this case was one of reinforcement. From the modern era, I can cite the unusual but eloquent example of humanists and painters writing their own names on the painted walls of the Domus Aurea in Rome. Within these decorative motifs termed »grotesques« due to their subterranean nature, their graffiti was an example of in-inscription, writing their names into a context in order to become part of it. Finally, in Cubism, writing combined technically with painting, as can be seen in the analytical period in particular. This combination occurred both through fragmentation and through mathematical-conceptual composition that made the text a system for referring to the real world, a certificate of reality.

To understand where to locate Edith Urban’s writing, we shall first take an example that is as banal as it is eloquent, namely the lines in school exercise books. In Italy, the lines in these exercise books vary according to the school year for which they are intended, to accompany the gradual process of learning to write. Pages for the first and second years of primary school have a vertical line and horizontal lines with differing spacing. Each page consists of eight spaces measuring 22 mm, at the centre of which are two lines 6 mm apart to serve as a guide for the central body of the letters. For the third year of primary school, on the other hand, whilst the vertical margins remain, the lines for writing are much narrower, with 10 spaces measuring 16.5 mm, whilst the space for the body of the letters measures 3 mm. From the fourth year onwards, pupils move on to the line format that will be used for writing in all the upper years, with or without margins. Each page contains 12 spaces 15 mm wide and a space for the body of the letters measuring 2.2 mm.

These examples of line spacing show us the importance not only of the rules governing the text and its size in laying out a page, but also, in their absence, the image of empty space. The lines are the framework upon which the elements making up the writing are distributed and arranged. In a sense, they are the structure of the writing. In the same way, painting uses a canvas support, which in turn is stretched on a frame, so as to make a conceptual connection with the lined page and between the use of colour and the written word. This proximity is even more evident when it comes to the ornamental aspect.

A short digression on ornamentation

Given its evidence in many of Edith’s works, it is necessary to include a short parenthesis on ornamentation.

For art historians such as myself, a fundamental point of reference when discussing decoration or ornamentation is the text by Alöis Riegl, Stilfragen, which provides a key to interpreting changes in the style of decoration over time. The fact of lying outside iconic figurative representation, and existing more as a contest between rhythm and direction, makes writing a particular decorative motif, a frieze that by transcending the closed image, goes beyond the function of representation to occupy a non-objective plane. This non-objectivity is the result of the syntactic combination of repetition and pause, between the expectation of linearity and the fear of digression. This is even more true of arabesques, where meaning derives from the place and the space that they occupy, or rather coincides with the meaning that emerges from the reading of a code and the transformation of graphic marks into words. The light veil of curlicues arranged over the empty space is destined to merge into the space on the one hand, but on the other hand to construct its »own« space on the basis of a logic that is either geometric or calligraphic. The more writing approaches this state, the further it departs from the closed image, and even if it is a comment, caption or celebration of the image, it shines with an obscure power, because of the cursive, open structure, articulated by the rhythm of its signs, that it shares with ornamentation. Decoration in the medieval period, for example, had a life of its own because it went beyond ornamentation subordinated to the architectural order, to play its part in the artistic value of the artwork, to the extent of becoming more important than the image in certain cases. Once decoration has abandoned its function as a border to a figurative text, as a whole it becomes a necessary solution that more than simply encompassing a form, ultimately comes to represent it. As a result, excessive orna-mentation, with its spirals, scrolls and emblems, ends up obscuring the meaning of the image. It was this excess that aroused the anger of Adolf Loos in his famous 1908 essay Ornament and Crime. Loos restored the dignity of a potential field of meaning to empty space, the white page, and thanks to its function as a concrete support for words and images, it was also deemed able to support the absence of one or the other. An image, whether explicit or merely evoked, depends upon the organisation of a space in which everything is on hold, in other words apparently in stasis. And the background becomes fundamental in deciphering the overall meaning of the writing, cum-textum, at least to the same extent as the ceiling of Nero’s palace in Rome for the painters who carved their names into its surface in the 15th century. By being inserted into that dimension, their signatures were declaring their belonging not just to another time but to another space. And the blank page also functions in a similar way.

In the small portrait at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Stéphane Mallarmé, painted by Edouard Manet in 1883, is resting his hand on several blank sheets. Both the painter and the poet, in painting and writing, are faced with the issue of the blank page. For Mallarmé, the page was protected by its whiteness, a whiteness that is the true domain of imagination.

The smallest indication, sign or line constituting the obscure seed of the word presents itself as a limit and a horizon because it hints at what will be an essential subdivision within the space. So the line constitutes the extent to which an empty space is exhibited, a space that in spite of the disturbance of its purity, emerges as an area of meaning, a place existing in thought or logos. This »spoken« empty space is exhibited and once presented within its dimensions, in other words between its margins, becomes an image7. Like the current of a river between its banks, decoration disturbs one of the images of the empty space, tending towards writing, as its line moves in rhythm, giving rise to a »motif« that gives meaning to the repeated gesture within the sign and to the area in which it moves, creating an image »within« the void. We must therefore consider Edith Urban’s paintings as alternations of images.

γράφειν  

Edith’s paintings trap images that present themselves to the eye on two levels: that of the ornamental motif we have already discussed, and that of the graphic subject-object. By graphic here we must understand the sign, the writing that in addition to evoking images, defines an atmospheric frame in which the quotation enters into an analo-gical contest with the painting. In the context of Edith’s paintings, Horace’s phrase ut pictura poësis is resolved in an abstract, linear form that maintains the relationship to the literary meaning on the one hand, and on the other hand, to the pictorial aspect, the source of meaning deriving from the colour laid out in bands, lines and fields. It subtly and very skilfully insinuates itself as a subtext, whilst remaining embedded in the fabric of the painting, in the coverage of the surface. These letters or notes etched into the colour in-scribe themselves, simultaneously representing and referring to a mental trajectory beyond external appearance. The ambiguity of the word written or in-scribed into the paint highlights the word’s limits and concessions with regard to the image, limits that we can describe in the words of one of Magritte’s titles as »treacheries of the image«. In Edith’s works, this treachery does not occur through figurative means but after the assimilation of the written sign into the painting. René Magritte liked images with obscure meanings because he liked to see them as they were, and similarly, the writing in Edith Urban’s paintings is to be seen as it is. In Edith’s works, Frank Stella’s »what you see is what you see« becomes »what you read is what you read«. What is presented as writing relates to the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s concept of Erlebnis, in other words an awareness experienced by a con- sciousness open to the different means of feeling, and consequently also the ways of perceiving and therefore apprehending reality. By removing interpretation from the pedestal that hermeneutic thinking has placed it upon, the idea once again becomes the protagonist, an idea presented to the senses as an experience of the senses. Edith’s idea seems to be to create a cohabitation between the immediate elements of sensation, as if they were passive data, and an intentional practice, so that, to quote Husserl once more, what first strikes us in »purely aesthetic« terms then reveals itself to be a symbol or a linguistic sign8. In substance, Edith’s writing, more than a stolen fragment, is an ornament. As γράφειν, it is the formless essence of the sensation that has lost its intentional character linked to a literal image by dint of being in-scribed into the painting. In other words, the written quotation is nothing other than a reiteration of the linear painting. Much has been said about Edith using fragments on the basis of the ancient concept of εκφρασις, in other words a descriptive account in its own right that shows a specific object from an equally specific viewpoint. This would not make sense if it was immersed in the painting, and the writing does indeed lie within, rather than on top of the painting, at least to the same extent as Cy Twombly’s signs and curlicues.

For Edith Urban, the quotation encourages a reconstruction of the text from which it has been extrapolated, in other words it enhances its representation by conforming the atmosphere evoked to a broader context to which it belongs. Extracted as a phrase in its own right, this written note, whilst indicating its source as the appropriate domain for a discursive solution, presents itself in the painting as a cursive motif and adapts its meaning to the atmospheric nature of the colour. The painting, even though it is governed by rigid fields that are aligned and superimposed, nevertheless remains an emotional creation, pulsating in its tones, which seems to lay claim to a translucent light beyond the rigid limits of the division into bands. In the same way, the writing, which is inscribed into these divisions, loses the parentage of the text from which it was extrapolated, to exist sub specie pictorica as a subject-object. Although the placement of the writing within the spacing of the coloured lines is clear, this placement does not seem to dictate a figurative pause and less still a pictorial interlude, but rather seems to be a different way of presenting the painting. The image is immersed in a literary atmosphere that functions like a bridge between the chromatic solutions that precede and follow it. In my opinion, the fragmentary nature of the written elements transcends interruption and division: the fragment is no longer a trace of something and comes together with the substance of the colour. The fragment often reminds me of Heraclitus, the philosopher we know through this form9. His ideas of lightening and motion transcended the fragmentation of the text from which the phrases we recognise probably came, because they contain the essence of a whole, an essence that is all the more present through the absence. This is the nature of Edith’s fragments: an atmosphere that cannot be isolated from the painting. So the phrase, the fragment of text, is linked to a deprivation, a cut or a removal, attracting our attention momentarily outside of the pictorial text but then returning it to the representative content of the painting.

Beyond the line

Edith Urban does not always follow a linear path, however. The marks that seem to fall like coloured snow onto the linear rhythm are dynamic notes that also share an atmospheric value, in the same way as the embroidery-like forms are traces of existence with annotations and commentaries, as if they represented the classification of a journey through memory that someone wanted to preserve within the precious confines of a reliquary, almost as an ex-voto. Small works that accumulate excerpts and fragments of private experiences, like the bottoms of drawers or closets, are offered up to a gaze that opens up and scrutinises the most intimate domestic atmosphere. Or else we find a diagram, a sort of architectural sketch of the sort seen in her 2014 work Elle est descendue en ville avec Franck pour faire quelques achats urgents, elle n’as pas précisé lesquels / maintenant la maison est vide (mixed media on canvas, 140 x 100). This work, with its title taken from Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie, resembles a loose leaf from a notebook on which the features of a place visited on a singular bibliographic Grand Tour have been sketched. Edith seems to draw notes of impressions evoked by her experience, concealing between the lines the calling points of her tourism of the soul. This wandering between books and colours, between spaces enclosed by the passage of the brush and opened up by reading, occasionally reveals an imaginary edifice between the lines.

The exhibition in Viterbo. Curator’s note

For this exhibition, I chose a number of works by Edith Urban that reflect this extensive property of the word written into the painting. My curatorial hypothesis starts from the presumption that the space occupied by the Galleria Miralli, the ground floor of the Palazzo Caetani-Chigi dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, already carries the traces of historic architectural writing. So for the exhibition I chose paintings with heraldic connotations, which are arranged within the space like shields with horizontal stripes, alternating evocation of the past with contemporary abstraction. We begin with the oldest: so tonlos, so raumlos. unverändert auf sich nur gestellt, ungefährdet wandelt es im kreise / senza suono, senza spazio. gira nel vuoto, immutato e riferendosi solo a se stesso (tao te king, lao-tse, mixed media on canvas, 150 x 100, 1998/99), and then continue with works dating from 2013 and beyond. Amongst the smallest works, I would like to highlight the small dark painting that in my opinion merits an autonomous position both for its monochrome appearance and for its evocation of an igneous artefact. These works have been arranged so that visitors can observe the continuity and coherence of the pictorial-literary discourse irrespective of the format of the individual works.

marcello carriero