Context:

Albert Camus was a French writer and philosopher. His most significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, resulting from our desire for clarity and meaning within a world that offers neither.

He explains his idea of the absurd in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The title of the book comes from a story in Greek mythology and uses the myth as a metaphor to discuss and question the idea of suicide and the value of life.

Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology described as one of the cleverest yet most devious men in history. Because of his cruel ways, he was condemned by the gods (the judges of the dead) to perpetually push and roll a huge rock up a mountain, only to watch it plunge to the bottom again.

Camus presents Sisyphus’s ceaseless and pointless task as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Project:

After reading the book and highlighting certain sentences or words – either for their intense and important meaning or their poetic/lyric qualities – I wanted to create a piece that visually explains and expresses both the importance of the book and the Greek myth itself.

For this purpose, I chose letterpress as the medium (due to the frustration it carries), and the highlighted text was used as the content for the book. The final piece (completed by June 2007) consists of three volumes that together attempt to represent the reader’s journey when reading and metaphorically refer to the Myth and our journey as human beings.

This project emerged while working—during the summer of 2004—in the letterpress workshop at the London College of Communication. I helped tidy and reorganize the whole workshop and while doing so, I found 3 huge boxes that were full of lead, old slugs, lines of text, sentences and words that have been created probably in the 1960’s-1970´s with a linotype machine.  The cast words and sentences were “sitting” there waiting to be recycled, destroyed and melted down to create new words, new sentences and new meanings.

I started to select them by their singular meanings, for their visual qualities or because I could feel they had some “hidden” potential. I ended up selecting around 600 (out of more than 3 or 4.000) and randomly grouped them into galleys. Initially I lay them as columns and printed them.  A “new language” emerged. It was a very powerful visual one, made out of different type fonts, different sizes and spacing that emerged by mixing them randomly.

A narrative started to emerge; a fragmented one, full of connotations and meanings and with linguistic qualities. They were no longer just visual. I started to analyze their qualities and soon I realized that they could represent, in a typographic way, the Deconstructivist theory by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

It is in that stage that I realized that I could divide the columns of text into little poems or fragmented narratives and once printed they became powerful systems of signification. 67 poetic narratives emerged and I decided to do a book.

Each city possesses a unique image, a distinctive skyline that, to some extent, reflects the rhythm, lifestyle, and energy of its inhabitants. The construction of a skyline is a deliberate process, entailing a myriad of considerations—from identity and ego to sexuality and psychology.

In this context, I aimed to experiment with the image and ideal of a city. The skyline, an imagined and essential representation, encapsulates all the elements and essence that render it recognizable and unique, like an icon. New York and London served as my primary inspirations for this project.

A skyline is not merely a visual representation; it embodies a city. Every city offers numerous angles, perspectives, and skylines, which evolve with time and weather, mirroring the changes in both the city and its inhabitants.

Cities and skylines mutate akin to living organisms, encapsulating time. Holistically grasping cities like New York or London proves impossible; we only encounter fragments, each providing a unique experience.

Various formats
Letterpress on Paper

Image 1: Fluo Skyline.

Image 2: Rhythmic Skyline.

Image 3: Black Skyline.

Image 4: Colour Skyline.

Image 5: Barbican Skyline.

Tides is a collection of monoprints that explores the relationship between positive and negative space using 24pt letterpress ornaments. Created during COVID lockdown, this work represents a visual journey of the tides along a stretch of the Thames River near my studio, at the Thames Barrier in London.

It was printed in London on glossy paper using a 1950s FAG proofing press.