Adib Fricke
Word Vistas
Notes on my work with words and texts
I have been working with words and text since the late 1980s. I love words, with their many layers of meaning and their visual forms. On small or large surfaces, printed in books or on banners, or painted on walls – my work creates lexical spaces. One can wander through them, lost in thought, observing the words and even touching them on the walls.
My works’ visibility and readability can be freely encountered by the viewers with their own questions about meaning and non-meaning. The words are striking in their large letters on the wall. They seem – although from far away – to speak. What the viewers understand here is always right.
The words and fragments can be scanned by the eye and approached from any direction. The viewers establish variable connections within the multilayered compositions. Everyone reads something different.
The color I use in some works renders the words spectacular. They create a stir and enter into a contrasting relationship with their surroundings. The perspective distortion in certain recent works is a means of focusing spatial perception and causing the words to hover, both literally and figuratively.
For an author, words and sentences communicate statements through which something is conveyed. Central to me as an artist is the openness of the word-works to their viewers. Thematic statements are the impulse to begin a work, to plunge into a world of meaning whose immediacy disappears in the working process. Despite the suspension of meaning and the departure from the origin of the textual material, the characteristic style of the speaking subject remains. Sometimes more visible than before.
My work to date can be divided into three cycles:
– The current works, which are bracketed together under Public Words and are based on digital text collections. I collect texts on defined concepts and fragment them. The artworks grow out of these fragments.
– The Word Company, the business through which I produced and distributed meaningless neologisms (protonyms) from 1994 to 2004. The trigger effect was truly achieved here when the works, such as ONTOM and QUOBO, shown in exhibitions also became the exhibition titles, or when QUIVID was commissioned as the name for Munich’s percent for art program.
– the antonym of synonym is antonym, a separate work that has in retrospect become the overall term for my experimental text and word works from 1988 to 1994 in which I programmed random generators, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s Smile, or published 30 advertisements for myself as an artist, as with AdibProp, in various contexts.
© 2010, shortened version
Translation (from German) by Michael Turnbull
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