While being colour blind may seem like a great disadvantage for a visual artist, it can in fact also be an impetus to creativity. Such is the case for Austrian text-based artist Anatol Knotek who instead of colours uses letters, words and minimalistic visual elements to create simple yet powerful works of visual poetry. As E. B. White said, “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it”, and Knotek does exactly that. Using only a handful of letters or words, stripped of linguistic baggage, grammatical decorum and excess noise, he visually arranges them – bending, skewing, scratching and even setting them aflame – into minimalist compositions that are simultaneously clear-cut and incisive, obvious and profound. For Knotek, words are a malleable material whose linguistic meaning is equivalent to its visual resonance.
Courtesy of Yazter