SIMON LEWTY | CALLIGRAPHICAL PALIMPSESTS

Leaving the Laurel Grove, 1991, Ink, crayon and acrylic, 54 x 53cm

“Should I call it presence in absence, or absence in presence, or both? It’s something of that order.”

Was there a more enigmatic 21st-century British artist than Simon Lewty, whose work was evolving in mysterious ways right until his death, aged 80, in January?

“The mystery,” he offers, in the same filmed interview (conducted by Peter Larkin for Art First, his representatives since 1991) “is to be found in the clarity”.

Born in Warwickshire, the artist never left the country, taking his holidays in Swanage, where he had a second studio (the first being in Leamington Spa). His early artwork contains figurative elements: ‘city chimneys, mandrake roots, figures escaped from a Punch & Judy show’*. 

Latterly, around the turn of the millennium, he dropped the figuration entirely, focussing on calligraphic representations of his dreams. Art became a way to access his subconscious, his practice becoming ‘a process of listening to what you want to do and finding it in the text.’

The artist concentrated on the practical considerations of the process, and the words flowed, unbidden, from within him. There’s an element of the Dadaists’ ‘surrealist automatism’ about it, albeit in extremely neat handwriting.

“Should they be read, or looked at?” he muses, in the same interview, about his latter works. The answer, of course, is both, and more: they can be interpreted, too, if you have the inclination. 

He’s fond of the term ‘palimpsest’, suggesting that there are plenty of layers buried beneath those words. They represent “a covering, which is at the same time that which it covers.” Get involved in one, and you may be there for hours.

Three of Simon Lewty’s works, from different periods of his career, will be shown by Art First, at Stand 54, alongside pieces by Bridget MacDonald, Kate McCrickard, Jack Milroy and Donald Teskey. Director Clare Cooper has just launched a new gallery space adjoined to her offices in Lambeth with an exhibition of the work of Helen MacAlister, also rooted in language (the two were frequently co-exhibited by the gallery).

*From his Guardian obituary, by Paul Hills