Breaking Lines: Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry review – the beauty of art made by typewriter – The Guardian

19 January 2025

The typewriter drawings of a British Benedictine monk in the swinging 60s are so startling they deserve a sheaf of exclamation marks (although he himself barely used them). Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-92) was always sparing with the punctuation, and so modest of spirit that on his artworks his name invariably appears in lower case. Sometimes it is typed in a vertical configuration – dsh – running down the page like a tiny Japanese inscription. Which is apt, for all of dsh’s “typewritings” amount to a foreign language.

Which is to say that although his works are composed of the letters and punctuation marks of an old manual Olivetti, they are not meant to be read so much as viewed. And what you see, on the framed A4 pages he liked to use, can be almost entirely abstract. A shifting pattern of dots, whirling constellations of commas, a vibration of hyphens that is something like visual interference. There is a beautiful work in the Estorick Collection in which a dense field of oblique strokes is interrupted by a single line of brackets, running diagonally up the sheet, which might be read as a ripple in water or time.

What is so surprising is the way Houédard’s images hold the page so powerfully as to suppress all curiosity about which letters he is using. A figure seems to be walking upstairs, or perhaps it is downstairs. There is no figure; there are no stairs. In fact there are only innumerable hyphens. But so superb, and subtle, is the configuration of all these fractional lines that it seems as if someone is ascending, or descending, through a body of air.

Only imagine how on earth Houédard did this. He is not drawing with a pencil, painting with a brush, or etching with a needle. The interplay between his fingers – pressing down on the keys, turning the page this way and that – and the final image on the wall is frankly fantastical. It requires him to establish every mark in his mind’s eye, long in advance of typing. The obvious, if remote, analogy is with weaving on the warp and weft of a loom.

Read more of Laura Cumming's review in The Guardian here.