All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously that; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
I must have been ten years old when one afternoon my father showed up with a single volume of the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo Americana. It was Volume 16: CRE-CHARG. I celebrated the arrival of the new book in a house where reading material was scarce.
Among the countless entries in the volume, I discovered one that captivated me: cryptography, defined as “the art of writing enigmatically” (From the Greek kryptós, hidden, and graphein, to write). What a fascinating mission it was—to create a code that only you yourself could understand. I still keep the table I drew back then, convinced that no one would ever be able to decipher the messages encrypted with it.
Fifty years later, I find myself immersed in multiple series of drawings that make me reflect on the significance of that childhood pastime. Back then, I encoded reality to make it inaccessible and secret from others. Now, I try to transcribe what I do not understand.