Fragments, Frequency, and the Sub-Literal Realm
A reflection on forging a visual language
People sometimes tell me they can recognize one of my pieces across the room - it “looks like a Cecil Touchon.” And while I’m grateful for that recognition, I don’t really think of style as something you set out to create. For me, it’s more like an atmosphere that forms around a long, continuous act of paying attention. The work shapes you as much as you shape it.
My own direction clarified - unexpectedly - during a move to Central Mexico in 1998. We were relocating to Cuernavaca, and somewhere around three in the morning, we found ourselves driving through a mostly empty Mexico City.
The city was asleep, but the highways were lit with these massive illuminated billboards - advertisements in Spanish, glowing like floating screens in the dark. Some were legible. But others had been tampered with - scrambled intentionally once the advertiser’s contract was over. The plywood sheets were misaligned, messages broken, letters fragmented and inverted. These were no longer signs that meant something in the traditional way. They had slipped out of the realm of language and into something else - something visual, rhythmic, almost musical.
And I was mesmerized.
That moment stayed with me. I realized I wasn’t interested in what the signs were trying to say - I was interested in what they had become once their meaning fell apart. It felt like the language had undergone a kind of rupture, and in doing so, revealed something deeper. And that’s what set me off on what would become my typographic abstractions - a long, ongoing body of work.
I had already been interacting with visual poets online and was interested in the idea visual poetics. So seeing the bill boards in this context was perhaps quite a natural leap in a certain way. But visual poets think about language in ink on a page, visual artists think in poetic images at any scale.
Around this same time - 1998 - within the same community of poets the idea of asemic writing was being formulated. I had been making abstract mark making for many years by that time following Mark Tobey, and others but now - among poets - it had been dubbed asemic writing. I was developing my ideas on the same ideas with fragmented typography. Then, when I presented my collages in the typographic abstraction format as being asemic, some said but it is not writing, I argued it was, never the less, asemic in nature.
Over time, I began to think of it like this:
I am releasing the letterforms from their thankless burden of being bearers of meaning.
These symbols - these shapes - spend their lives in service to our intellects. When we read, we look through them, past them, hunting for meaning in the words they form. We rarely see the letters themselves much less the silence of the surface on which they rest.
What I’ve chosen to do is disrupt that contract. To make every part alive.
Instead of language functioning as a conveyor of semantic information, I fracture it, recompose it, and allow it to become something else entirely - a visual composition, or maybe even a musical structure. Something that speaks not to the logical mind, but to the intuition. The eye. The body.
It’s a kind of visual poetry, yes - but poetry made from the ghosts of language. It lives between the lines, in the leftover spaces where meaning used to be.
And I came to see this practice as more than just a visual strategy. It became a kind of philosophy of attention. A way of engaging equally the negative and positive spaces and shifting them back and forth and using texture and color and form and composition as a painter would do - pulling the type out of the land of utility and into painterly culture.
My work became a dialogue with what I think of as the sub-literal realm—a stratum beneath intellectualization, where perception has not yet congealed into words. It is a primal ground of knowing, a way of receiving experience without translating it into language. In this space, fragments and signals retain their raw resonance: broken texts, stray images, cultural detritus, all vibrating with meaning that is felt rather than read. This is the territory in which I work - the undercurrent of the massurreality where advertising, political spin, cultural memory, and myth all collide, not as coherent narratives but as a storm of half-forgotten texts, whispers, and impressions. It is here, in this field of sub-literal resonance, that visual poetry takes shape.
For this reason I maintain a connection to the recognition of the forms of language in order to suggest that my work is in conversation with this contrast between knowledge gathering and knowingness. To explore that region where words cannot follow or interpret.
So yes, my work may look distinctive. But it’s not because I’m trying to make a brand or a style. It’s because I’ve been tuning in to a certain frequency - one I first heard on a dark Mexican highway, when language broke open and revealed itself not as a servant of meaning, but as a living, visual form.
A form that no longer needs to say anything in order to be something.
Cecil, when you write: "And I came to see this practice as more than just a visual strategy. It became a kind of philosophy of attention. A way of engaging equally the negative and positive spaces and shifting them back and forth and using texture and color and form and composition as a painter would do - pulling the type out of the land of utility and into painterly culture."
You are indicating a breakthrough attributed to Jasper Johns, who painted FLAG in 1954-1955. The encaustic painting straddled the fence of being a flag and a representation of a flag. Johns said the painting was something "the mind already knows." This is perhaps what you refer to when you cite "utility" (meaning the use of the flag as a national or regional symbol of something) and artifice (painted representation). In that there is tension and something significant about how we perceive reality, or as you put it, a philosophy of attention.
Thanks for the shoutout to Houston, my hometown. I am intrigued by the Laura Rathe Art Gallery. I will have to check it out.
I used to attend a series called “Looking at Art” conducted by Marshall and Victoria Lightman. We would meet once a week for several weeks and visit two art galleries a night where the artist was usually present to speak about their work. They focused mostly on contemporary art.
I don’t believe Rathe’s gallery was on any of our art tours. So, thanks for the introduction.