As Didier Ottinger, the curator of Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language explains: “Everywhere, images came before letters: in Egypt, China and Mesopotamia, as in the Americas, the first forms of writing were pictograms and ideograms, or stylised drawings. The advent of letters, of the alphabet, revolutionised writing. The shift from images to the written word inevitably involved loss, as if abandoning images gave rise to a nostalgia for meaning: letters no longer directly carried the meaning conveyed by images. The cost of this shift was a palpable draining of vigour, a dis-incarnation. From the Chinese (写: xiĕ), to the Greek (γγράφγράφειν ράφειν: graphein), via the Arabic ( :ُبُتْكَييَكْتُبُ yaktub), the respective verbs for “to write”, in their etymology, relate to pictures and painting. Western poets and writers taking the path of abstraction turned to non-European civilisations, in particular the Arab world and the Far East.




