Ex-Press Letters, Fernando Aguiar
Timglaset, 2021
For fans and practitioners of visual poetry, the publication of new work by the legendary Portuguese artist-poet Fernando Aguiar is always an exciting moment, and his second book from Swedish publisher Timglaset is no exception.
Titled
simply Ex-Press Letters (2021), Aguiar’s book is a series of 58 letterpress
and Letraset visual poems, generally arranged in a vertical manner upon warm
backgrounds of quietly painted bands of watercolor. Overall, the book engages the reader/viewer
playfully, gently, almost peacefully, like a series of walks through the
countryside. To view the pieces in Ex-Press Letters is like watching the
silhouetted flittings of songbirds among fields of tall grass that sway almost
imperceptibly in a sun-touched breeze. Here is one of my favorites from the
book:
The
peaceful qualities of Ex-Press Letters stand in contrast to the the
strong sense of movement and evocations of narrative found in the dry transfer
minimalist poems of his first book with Timglaset, Poems Without Words (2019).
Composed of only a letter, parts of letters, or a few letters at a time, the
black and white pieces of Poems Without Words dance and laugh and cry as
they explore the dynamics of scale and page space, seeking to reveal the
idiosyncratic personality and inner life of language’s materiality. Here is an example:
Besides showing Aguiar’s range as a visual
poet, these two books also exhibit the same sense of play, the same curiosity
about and exploration of the expressive qualities of language’s visual
components in search of alternative forms of poetic expression. But the poems
in Ex-Press Letters feel somehow stiller, quieter, than the pieces in Poems
Without Words. They seem somehow outside of time. Perhaps it is that the
pieces are more uniformly constructed with a vertical orientation. Perhaps it
is because of the inviting color palettes of the backgrounds or the generally
conventional orientation of the letters on the page. Whatever it may be, it is,
nevertheless, interesting to note that the author composed these pieces in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, and is only publishing them now. Despite this
knowledge about the chronological age of the pieces in the book, one could
conjecture that the poems were composed as recently as last year, last month,
or last week – a remarkable accomplishment, indeed. Here is another beautiful
example:
Beyond the gentleness, there is also a heightened sense of anonymity in Ex-Press Letters that results in feelings of welcomeness and acceptance. As one could think of a physical landscape as anonymous, as belonging to no one, as accepting the physical body of anyone who enters it, the pieces of Ex-Press Letters seem to invite, welcome, even reassure and accept, the viewer. Again, while the precise mechanisms that engender these feelings are likely a complex combination of the Aguiar’s deft techniques, the result and effect are so congenial that one is simply aware of being happy and of being made happy, through the freedom of visual exploration. As the author notes in his description of the book on Timglaset’s website, “It does not have a title, author's name or any other informative reference. This information is only reproduced on a transparent banner. If the banner is lost, there is no way to identify the book …". But it is the implication of this gesture that is truly important, an implication that constitutes an acknowledgement of and respect for the humanity of the viewer. Ultimately, the triumph of Ex-Press Letters is its ability to allow the recognition and enjoyment of one’s own humanity through the work.
