Mr. Savethewall International Language - Catalogue

Mr. Savethewall - Mr. Savethewall International Language - Catalogue

Five hundred years ago Leonardo Da Vinci affirmed that painting should have been “pure mental thing”; a hundred years ago Duchamp, driven by a same kind of necessity, went from painting to ready-made, claiming that the object has to be a background and has to be barely touched with the glance, so to catch the truly interesting aspect: its “verbal” significance.

In the series International Language Mr. Savethewall starts from English words, showing them purely and matching them with their significant and signifier, representing the image of their meaning in black and white. As defined by linguist Ferdinand De Saussure1, language is the social outcome of speech and, at the same time, a set of necessary conventions adopted by the social community to allow individuals to speak. As a matter of fact, a language is a system made of different signs that correspond to different ideas, which develop from a set of “words” and include also phonetic. For this very reason, in these works Mr. Savethewall does not show just the concept (the meaning), but also the acoustic image (signifier) that make his “words” recognizable and intelligible for all the individuals of a specific community, despite the arbitrary visual sign.

With this project Mr. Savthewall acknowledges the importance of the contemporary use of English language and configures a true global artistic language, a “Lingo” , made of an alphabet of letters, numbers and words, and an abecedary with images that refers to the semantic areas of his poetic. (Chiara Canali)