Cecil Touchon

The Neoist Society presents this important document of Neoism for a world hungry for a new revolutionary message. This unusual - trans lingual - edition is an abstract manifesto that allows the user to interpret it in any way that he can. Literally any Neoist from any place or any time can understand it's purely visual message.

In this book of poetry Cecil Touchon extracts material from the very fabric of the massurreality; texts from spam email. In these poems Touchon gives us a contemplative glimpse into contemporary artistic practice where the artist becomes, much more a connector of things than a creator. Every day trillions of bits of data are transmitted over the Internet. As artists peer into this world of information overload a vast body of incoherent data is brought into view. Much like the subconscious explored by the early Surrealists, Touchon uses this raw material to explore unlikely configurations through the use of found text, the abutment of random, unrelated words and phrases such as the classic example from Lautreamonts Chants de Maldoror: "the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella". This embrace of randomness is central to Touchon's poetic output.

Our current experiment from our labs called Fluxus Laboratories (fluxuslaboratories.org) is to supply Artisan Santa Fe with larger and better quality strips of mark-making test paper to put on the counters near the pens and markers for us to collect into the Archives so that we can capture this communal scribbling, squiggling, doodling and testing by artists which we then hope to document with catalogs such as this one and make the scribbles available for future exhibitions where this kind of material will be of interest to viewers. The images in this book are scans of some of that mark making on the new paper we have been supplying to the store. The paper strips in this first round of testing were installed in early January 2020 and replaced in early February 2020. The present book is a collection of communal scribbling by whichever artists happen to be testing out pens and markers on the paper during this time frame.

The first volume of a four volume set covering the creative work of Cecil Touchon for the year 2019. During the course of the year Touchon produced a diverse body of work including paintings, collages and works on paper.

The Iberian Variations suite started around 1987. The original thought was to create a series of gestural Abstract Expressionist collages. The idea eventually developed into the 'constructed gesture'. This was to make the material very freely and without concern for an 'image' and then construct the composition by cutting up the source material that I had prepared and arrange into a gesture. This strategy allowed me to work in a careful and controlled way in order to look for a composition that interested me. The works in this volume were created between 2010 - 2019.

These poems are created using vernacular sources for materials such as restaurant receipts, poetic structures Touchon made with spam email, pages of lists from magazines as palimpsests to then overwrite the texts on the pages using the existing texts as prompts for his asemic writing. Touchon also used various authors' poems whose structures he liked in the same way by printing out the poems on white sheets and then overwriting the texts. Some of the poets included e. e. commings, David Drew, Vito Acconti, documents from Sigmund Freud, some pages from Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, etc. In short, any sort of page composition that Touchon could exploit with the use of asemic writing.

The idea behind asemic writing is to create artworks that are based on the act of mark making similar to handwriting but without reference to semantic content or literary meaning. I suppose you could call it a form of literary abstraction or perhaps non-objective literature. Hence each 'asemic writer' has a unique way of writing or making marks. When we look at handwriting, even if we are unable to decipher it, we are getting some sort of visual content out of it from looking at the marks and rhythms or distributions of the markings on the page. We can get a feeling of order or discipline or perhaps a frenetic energy, or playful or sloppy or it might seem confused or muddled. You might say this is the body language of the handwriting beyond the message conveyed. This body language is the part that is of interest in this work and to asemic writers in general.

This work is intended to be purely visual with no reference to literary content or convey any sort of symbols. There is an interest however in musicality, of moving the focal point of the eye along during the reading through repetition, cadence, movement, etc. It is a form of listening with the eye as the title of the book suggests. The idea behind asemic writing is to create artworks that are based on the act of mark making similar to handwriting but without reference to semantic content or literary meaning. Hence each 'writer' has a unique way of writing or making marks. When we look at handwriting, even if we are unable to decipher it, we are getting some sort of visual content out of it from looking at the marks and rhythms or distributions of the markings on the page. You might say this is the body language of the writing beyond the message conveyed. This body language is the part that is of interest in this work.

These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function freely with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. There is a kind of visual vocabulary however, such as letter-like marks, punctuation-like marks such as chevrons, commas, accents, dashes and dots, the organization for the most part is in lines of markings to suggest a reading of progression. Some are lyrical and look almost like what a visual music score might look like.I experimented with different rhythmic motions, different ways of holding the tool, sometimes in silence and at other times while listening to music. Sometimes I would watch closely as the work unfolded and at other times allowing my hand to move along the page unobserved in order to see what would happen.

In October 2013 Rosalia and Cecil Touchon spent a month in Paris, France. While there, Touchon collected paper and made 80+ collages in 30 days. Also include are related photographs taken in Paris and asemic writing as well as examples of several paintings made based on this set of collages.

The brush and ink drawings in this volume are from a sketchbook dating from 1982. If memory serves however, some portion of these drawing were from a later date, but all follow along the same train of thought so are presented here as a group from Sketchbook 1982 - A.

Collages by Cecil Touchon made as poems between 2014 -2019. This is a specific set of works within Touchon's oeuvre that he thinks of as different from his other typographic abstraction collages. This group is less concerned with an overall compositional image and tend to be more involved with structures similar to poetic architecture, often linier and working with open space like poetic texts on a page.

This is volume three in a set of asemic notebooks. Like volume one, these poems or texts or drawings depending on how you think about them were all made with an ink marker on 6x4 inch smooth, glossy photographic paper. My idea was to have the works function as if they were plates of texts in a book so that the image would appear without a visible background. In this way the writing or text uses the page itself as background in the typical way that print functions in a book.These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function in free flow with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. I prefer a more improvisational approach as if I am playing an instrument that records in marks what might otherwise be heard as notes of music.This is the natural realm of the arts; to work in a state of mindfulness or meditation.

The writings presented here were composed specifically for existing in a book environment as unified text. These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function in free flow with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. Touchon uses improvisational approach to mark making as if playing an instrument that records in marks what might otherwise be heard as notes of music and this might be a way to approach the work - to look as if listening; spending time studying the nature of the work; its flow, its progression, its repetitions, etc. just as we might have an aesthetic experience from looking at pages of text in a foreign language that we are not conversant in. In such a case we get to enjoy the work on a purely visual level without the conversion of the characters into linguistic meanings.

Collected poetry by Cecil Touchon from the years 2000 through 2011

Catalogue Raisonne for the year 2017. This work contains all works create over the course of a year in chronological order.

This is a catalog of works by Cecil Touchon created in the year 2016. This publication is something of a catalogue raisonne for the year. Very few photographic works are included other than images that document my artistic activity. Publishable photos may be found in a separate catalog. Otherwise, this book has almost every hand-made art work created during the year of 2014 including paintings, collages, drawings, sketches, and correspondence works. There may be a doodle here and there or a few unfinished works that have not be included, but this document accurately records the chronological order of at least 98% of the artwork for the year. Also included is documentation of exhibitions that Touchon was in or curated as well as collage poetry that was created over the course of the year. This document is intend to be a raw recording of work without any editing and represents a diary-like document of the artistic thought process.

Exhibition catalog for the Dada Centennial show with an international survey of contemporary collage and assemblage art with over 300 works shown.

A catalog of works completed during the year 2014 by artist Cecil Touchon arranged chronologically. The catalog includes paintings, collages, drawings, poetry, exhibition photos and interviews.

This is a catalog of works by Cecil Touchon created in the year 2015. This publication is something of a catalogue raisonne for the year. Very few photographic works are included other than images that document my artistic activity. Publishable photos may be found in a separate catalog. Otherwise, this book has almost every hand-made art work created during the year of 2015 including paintings, collages, drawings, sketches, and correspondence works. There may be a doodle here and there or a few unfinished works that have not be included, but this document accurately records the chronological order of at least 98% of the artwork for the year.