The book also has an introduction written by the Australian poet and publisher of Otoliths Mark Young.
Shanty Town is an asemic work that demonstrates how ordinary handwriting can be elevated into a fine art. The writing dashes with expressive speed and invention, and plays with legibility in a mode of gestural decisiveness. The book is a document of abstract energy and poetic brilliance, and when opened the book presents the reader with a new contrasting spirit to digital art, and re-engages with the real world in a way that speaks across time. The hectic calligraphy works with an urgency and proclaims a new mode of rough writing in the extreme.
Blurbs:
"Rough, unkept, spontaneous and free, Grzegorz Wróblewski's Shanty Town depicts a blurry world of post-literate indecipherability. With coarsely drawn shapes imposed upon a chaos of asemic writing, this collection is built from the rubble of uncomfortable truths. A triumph of bold writing."
— Dave Read
"Shanty Town packs a powerful punch. It stakes you straight through the heart and throws you overboard, only to next moment toss you a life buoy. It's Grzegorz Wróblewski's opus magnum, in which he brought together the heart and the mind on a whole new level. I see a world that worries him but nonetheless he manages to draw pure beauty from it. Somewhere in between, a fragile hope for salvation emerges. His own and ours."
— Karina Obara
"Manic notes from the underbelly. Scores scored out and scorching. Fenced off communities of frozen language. Prisons, pens and penal markings. Lines are blocked off, squashed into huddles and forever ringed or scarred. Sometimes a shape emerges shaken, tries to connect, map and communicate the inner terrain; but there's pain and great beauty here we can barely contemplate. Grzegorz Wróblewski's writings express the world village in trauma. There's nothing left to say, and this is the only way of saying it."
— Stephen Nelson
"The asemic projects of Grzegorz Wróblewski are a testimony to the skills of the human hand, used to convey meaning over millennia of evolution. In the infinite repetition of shapes, lines and colors, the hand reaches a state of maximum sensitivity that allows it to detect the epiphanic proto-signals of the micro- and macroworld."
—Anna Matysiak
"Shanty Town is an unusual work, full of compositions unlike anything else I've seen. The pages appear to have been made in 2 stages, drawn annotations over handwritten or hand-drawn ideas underneath. The first stage ranges from well-behaved written lines as in a letter, to jerky scribbled fragmentary jottings, to sketchy doodles, young ideas captured at high speed. The second stage uses shapes such as rectangles, circles and lines, which appear to be organizing or explaining the first stage they partly cover. Although rectangles and rectangular frames are widely used, these works are at the loosest end of rectilinearity. Wróblewski uses visual rhetoric in a poetic way."
—Tim Gaze, author of Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning, publisher of Asemic magazine
Product details
- Publisher : Post-Asemic Press (May 4, 2022)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 63 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1734866276
- ISBN-13 : 978-1734866278
- Item Weight : 5.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.15 x 9 inches
- Price : $12.00
Grzegorz' Bio:
