Contemporary Western Calligraphy

Contemporary Western calligraphy is an artistic trace-making practice concerned with the manual inscription of graphic signs and shapes taken (or derived) from the Latin alphabet: letters or fragments of it, numbers and punctuation marks, not necessarily combined into words or sentences. ¹ These signs (i.e. the elements of a linguistic system) and their shapes (namely all their different visible configurations) engender visual compositions that reaffirm the belonging of the written mark to the realm of the visible. In these artworks, it’s often the graphic power of the alphabetic sign that first strikes the viewer before the shapes are eventually recognised as letters or read.