Text

The Argentine artist Mirtha Dermisache began creating numerous works resembling handwritten text in the 1960s. Her visual compositions reference the familiar design conventions of text-based communication. While Dermisache’s drawings evoke the appearance of writing, they resist any resemblance to alphabetic letters or decipherable symbols, which is why the term ‘asemic writing’ is used to describe her work. In linguistics and semiotics, the word ‘seme’ refers to the smallest unit of meaning; thus, ‘asemic’ denotes something without meaning.