It was the first time I saw the material used to construct the forms of Karl Nawrot’s typeface Jean that I became curious. A series of abstract shapes, cut-out of an ‘Albert Heijn’ brand cardboard package [that once held dishwashing machine tablets], was being projected in a presentation of Karl and Radim Peško’s Lÿno typefaces in a gallery space in East Amsterdam. Both the shapes themselves and their negative referent glowed onto the wall, a self-contained loop, a transformed whole. That they were presented as base-material to be used to make letters reminded me that designed letters themselves are usually imagined and constructed from a skeleton – a basic structure (of an equal stroke) that we learn to recognise as the letter itself. This recognition that comes from repetitive seeing and doing, the skeleton is also the thing that remains. This is the same skeleton which most type-designers refer and then add to, decorate; flesh out; embellish – to make a new version of our alphabet. These cardboard forms I was looking at didn’t really suggest this basic structure – this skeleton – at all. It would be through these forms arrangement that they would eventually become ‘letter-like’. Brought back to resemble that familiar idea, but approached, this time, from reverse. That this set of blobby shapes and off-cuts could produce an alphabet was achieved by a puzzling of its non-fluent strokes.

It is not unusual that an artists handwriting or visual language will wind-up in a typeface; it lends the typeface an ‘atmosphere’ [something else that doesn’t have a skeleton]. This is the case with Jean, whose forms are influenced by the French/German Artist Hans [Jean] Arp. These blobby forms clearly relate to a formal/visual motif expressed in Arp’s work. But, cut out of that used box of dishwashing tablets we perhaps see a deeper consideration: An association to Arp’s conceptual practice. Of collage, of Dada, of abstraction, of poetry and Pop. Jean appropriates, or perhaps extracts, a not mutually exclusive form & meaning from what might otherwise be considered rubbish. Creating a possibility for discernible but uncanny letters, Simultaneously free and restricted – highlighting a tacit tension inherent in most type-designs. This ghost-holon-artifact [Nawrot’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’?] reminds me of what is in-between (a place I like), it manages to stay incongruous, autonomous. But as a digital contrivance, waiting to be activated, is stays warily connected to the whole, haunting the others.

These things tell me it might not only be the border of the letter that is important, but also what lies inside its dark silhouette and the material with which it is made – the silhouette which the philosopher Roland Barthes described as both an anatomic and semantic object – which, in this case, is certainly not a skeleton, but a phantom... Here, it is the air that now forms its background, distinguishing itself in place and time.