It is an undeniable fact that Pascal Dombis’s art has recently assimilated a growing number of words — even minimal syntagms — as random motifs in the pictorial compositions he produces. Paradoxically, this eminently visual artist has engaged very deeply in the semiotic interplay of words and letters, employing language as both a visual and conceptual medium. His manipulation of both text and letter forms challenges traditional notions of communication and representation, offering a multifaceted understanding of meaning in post-digital contemporary art.

To the distracted viewer, Pascal Dombis’s monumental public installations, saturated with slogans and tautologies, might appear as subversive expressions of political messages, as is the case with his confrontational installations in the I Am Not a Robot series, and the Invisible Generation murals shown in Pittsburgh and at the MACS in Sorocoba, Brazil (2022). But while postmodern Word Artists often convey urgent and politically charged messages, Dombis’s approach is far more abstract, focusing on the aesthetic or effacing qualities of printed words. Nevertheless, they share a common understanding of the transformative power of language, which sends us back to the lessons of experimental writers (and occasional literature haters!), such as William Burroughs, Pierre Guyotat and Henri Michaux… Dombis’s work invites viewers to contemplate words and their capacity to transcend conventional meanings, leading them to engage with language on deeper, more visceral but also more literal levels. At words’ feet.

Much more than Word Art, the heritage to which Pascal Dombis seems more sensitive stems from an earlier artistic period, as is made evident by his highly classical and mute sculpture Perpectives inversées, first exhibited in the gardens of the Domaine national de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, whose neoclassical design by Le Nôtre inspired him. But in his other paintings, “illuminated” by words or phrases, the grid motif, an emblematic structure of modern art, is the formal stance. In her seminal 1979 essay Grids, Rosalind Krauss wrote that “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Thus, Dombis emphasizes the aesthetic value of letters over conventional narrative forms. This alone makes him an unwitting disciple of the Lettrists, an artistic movement initiated by Isidore Isou in the 1940s, liberating language from its semantic constraints, exploring the visual potential of typography and even sometimes the phonetic qualities of language. His works often contain elements of abstraction that echo the lettrist desire to elevate letters to a form of visual art, inviting a reexamination of how language operates in visual space.

Sol LeWitt’s conceptual art, characterized by its focus on the idea behind the work rather than on the physical object, also provides a significant framework for understanding Dombis’s practice. LeWitt’s wall drawings and instructions for art highlight the importance of process and concept in contemporary art, paralleling Dombis’s approach to language as a medium. His works often resemble the systematic and mathematical precision found in LeWitt’s art, employing algorithms and fractals to create intricate visual compositions that evoke the conceptual rigor of minimalism. His fascination with structure and systematization mirrors LeWitt’s methodologies, as blatantly evident in pieces such as the many conceptual versions of the Rightrong series spanning the period from 2007 to 2020 and based on a proliferating opposition between the two words right and wrong, which end up losing letters, being accompanied by typographical signs and merging to form a refusal of the words’ binary relationship. This entire bank of signs can be found in a few experimental pages “permutated” by the American writer William Burroughs in the early 1960s. By utilizing language as a generative process, Dombis creates a dialogue between the conceptual underpinnings of his work and the viewer’s experience, challenging them to engage with the text beyond its semantic meaning. The influence of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism is also palpable in Dombis’s reduction of language to its most elemental forms. Malevich’s emphasis on basic geometric shapes as a means of expressing pure artistic feeling resonates with the artist’s desire to distill language into visual symbols. Both artists prioritize form over content, using abstraction to provoke a direct emotional response from the viewer, but also some doubts and even a certain sense of vertigo when it comes to checking one’s own cognitive capacity to read or misread linear narratives or formulas. Thus, Dombis challenges the viewer to confront the intrinsic beauty of the letters themselves, aligning with Malevich’s quest for a new visual language free from representational constraints. In our more than verbose age (and going against the cliché that the world reads less than it used to, given that the briefest incursion into any public sphere on the planet will find you surrounded by serial screen readers), Dombis boldly affirms that What You See is Not What You Read.

In this kind of artistic gesture, there is something not dissimilar from the “voyant” or “seer” for Rimbaud, who posited that it is the poet’s duty to transform language to reveal deeper truths. By manipulating texts, words, icons, textual puzzles, not to mention spams so brilliantly anamorphosized in his latest SpamScapes (exhibited at the Baroque Jesuit chapel in Chaumont in 2020), Dombis evokes visual and emotional experiences that extend beyond traditional meanings. His art becomes a quest for revelation through abstraction, offering viewers a means to experience language as a rich, multifaceted medium, a visual syntax that plays with the (re)arrangement of letters, creating compositions that are both aesthetically striking and conceptually rich, because they proliferate endlessly. This mathematical approach allows Dombis to explore themes of infinity and complexity within language, suggesting that meaning is not fixed or even arbitrary but rather a dynamic construct that evolves through interaction. By incorporating rhizomic and mirroring principles, Dombis invites viewers to experience language as a fluid and transformative medium, as is the case, for instance, in his recent Reality Control Hallucination (Post-Digital Burn). Twenty years ago, at the time of widespread retinal appetite for the virtual world, Annie Le Brun insisted, in her essay Du Trop de Réalité, on the tension that exists between representation and reality, implying that images may sometimes neutralize meaning, whereas words, due to their abstract nature, can precipitate fathomless interpretations of the real. Today, Dombis’s work offers confirmation that this was indeed a hallucinogenic deviation.

The artist presents letters in combinations arranged together like spider’s webs, with viewers being drawn to the motifs, texture and sometimes colors. This aesthetic appeal acts as a gateway to deeper engagement, prompting the viewer to consider the underlying text and its implications. Thus, the visible aspects of Dombis’s work serve to entice and provoke curiosity. However, he frequently obscures meaning through abstraction. As letters are rearranged, distorted, layered, and sometimes even burned, their original semantic functions are disrupted. This opacity encourages viewers to grapple with the idea that language can be much more than a straightforward means of communication. Dombis invites contemplation on the limitations of language itself. The transition from visibility to opacity suggests that meaning is always deferred and never fully present. It also reaches a climax in the works that explicitly borrow aphorisms or whole texts from William Burroughs. Pascal Dombis started to work on The Limits of Control (either digital prints on lenticular panels or video screens, in which the letters CTRL are turned into absurdist acronyms, like in a typical Burroughs “RUB OUT the word!” routine) at the time of the publication of documents leaked by Edward Snowden and the disclosure of the NSA global surveillance activity program.

Dombis takes computer processes as far as they will go in order to create unpredictable, unstable and accidental visual forms. In other words, his aim is to produce different perspectives based on machinist noise and Big Data excesses. During this excessive iterative process, some geometric shapes emerge, such as an X or a cross. These forms (and signs) appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly, produced from unstable alignments of millions of textual elements. In Dombis’s lenticular installations, the sensual transport that accompanies the viewers’ movements transforms what they see of the text, further emphasizing the fluidity of meaning. The viewers’ physical displacement turns them into active creators, aligning with the principles of poststructuralist theory that acclaim the reader’s role in constructing meaning.

To paraphrase so many of Burroughs’s maxims, we could say with Dombis that Image is Trapped in Word! The collaborative nature of artistic experience can also lead to physical transport and actual dizziness. In 2010, along the gallery of the Palais Royal in Paris, the monumental ribbon Text(e) ~Fil(e)s was trampled underfoot on a vertical axis, and contemplated from an obliquely horizontal perspective. The endlessness of these “moving” verbal carpets announced the artist’s recent obsession with the end of endless ends. When asked by an artpress journalist why his latest film Occupied City was so long, the visual artist-director Steve McQueen replied: “That’s precisely why the film is pure cinema. Because it takes time for the viewer to get into a contemplative mood. I have no interest in dates and places, but in what lies between them,  namely words. They’re very important to me, they help me find the right rhythm, get into the groove and put my mind on track”. In the same way, if one focuses on the titles of many of Dombis’s recent works (Time Cage, Hack Time, Obsolete Future, Endless Futures, Replay Future…), we are given the impression that indeed Time Comes from the Future. Pascal Dombis seems to announce with apparent glee that, whereas the end of art is decidedly not the end, his Ends of Words and Obsolete Writing (2023) publicly and universally celebrate, in Bogotá like everywhere else on the planet, the implosion of words and storytelling. William Burroughs described the process in “Precise Intersection Points” and “Hieroglyphic Silence,” two articles taken from The Third Mind: “I take a picture which stands for and, by God, is a word and it just naturally opens itself out, feeling for other pictures… doing what pictures will do. Just let the words dissolve in the picture.”

In the beginning was the Word, they say? In the end, the flux @&§^)-%= will prevail.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 148 to 153, essay by Didier Girard, translated by Susan Pickford