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Simon Lewty at David Krut Projects
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Leah Ollman
Simon Lewty's first solo show outside the U.K. introduced a mesmerizing voice of rapture and reflection. Born in 1941 in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, Lewty has been integrating word and image in his drawings for over 30 years. Organized by Art First London, this selection of 11 works constituted a mini-survey of the past decade, culminating in the most stunning recent works, broad expanses of handwritten text that could be visually entered and traveled through as images, but they also read as something between story, script and musical score.
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In He Could Not But Tell (2002), blocks of elegant calligraphy in red and warm black fill a large sheet. Long drawn lines interspersed amid the text act as scripted silences, musical rests. Lewty begins the text mid-sentence, as if picking up from another entry, and chronicles, in the manner of a questing wayfarer, passage through dark fields, hedges and gates; encounters with strangers; and a variety of internal propositions. Words traverse the page with the constancy and steadiness of footsteps. For Lewty, writing and walking are analogous processes of discovering place and self. His work, in this regard, feels akin to that of British artist/ramblers Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. More obviously, Lewty seems to channel William Blake and Adolf Wolfli, visionaries whose own manifestos of the imagination poured forth out of a similarly potent blend of compulsion and inspiration.
Recently, Lewty discovered a cache of his own childhood drawings, which he has been photocopying and incorporating into his work, along with other found images. In fact, all of the work here had a certain "found" quality to it, a sense of having originated in another era. Both the script and the language itself come across as antiquated, theatrically rarefied. The forms relate to illuminated manuscripts, old liturgical texts and medieval graffiti; the surfaces are aged by rubbings, fields of stray marks and abrasions.
For Approaches to an Ancient Fair (1995), Lewty collaged several irregular sheets into one absorbing totemic whole, 8 feet tall and just over 1 foot wide. A cursive script, in ink that shifts from safflower to brick to blue, meanders across images of vaguely mystical import--moons, stars, infinity symbols, odd hybrid creatures and imposing architectural structures, like a barrel vault and a bridge supported by inverted smokestacks. In some areas, the surface appears to be rubbed raw, reinforcing the work's relic-like quality. The words and thoughts in Lewty's art never succumb to the urgent clip of 21st-century urban life but keep instead to an obsolete, invigoratingly slow pace. Lewty makes art as might a survivor from the distant past with no choice but to persist in his testimony, his journey, his song.
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