Cecil Touchon

Cecil Touchon’s work is radically post-textual, yet encumbered by nothing but text and the space surrounding it. His technique, as demonstrated aptly here, is to dismantle physical pages of text and reconstitute them in ways that enhance the visual continuities of text and undermine their meaningful sequentiality. This is the ultimate form of deconstruction, a literal (in the hand, of the letter) slicing of the page into pieces that Touchon repositions into a new jigsaw puzzle, different than the one that he began with. This piece is particularly austere, presenting only three colors for our consideration: a mottled white, a red-brown, and a glimpse of black peeking through from the base of the collage. We are invited to consider this poem as a piece of writing transmogrified into a visual field through which we might glimpse what it means to be text, to understand text, and to inhabit text.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry > >