Former printer-typographer
and visual artist Guy Rombouts (1949) has strong feelings about
the relationship between form and content in language. He believes
the conventional symbols of the written word are purely arbitrary
and inadequate for expressing certain ideas and feelings.
Rombouts' fascination with this “inadequacy” has led him
to develop his own “more expressive” system of written
language. He has taken the 26 letters of the alphabet and created
replacements with new shapes. For instance, an angular line stands
for A, a curve for C. a zigzag for Z, etc. By combining these lines
into word-polygons, Rombouts has created a writing system that makes
language look like a continuous flow and, he claims, gives it “another,
new reality.”
“Romboutese” is the artist’s own pictorial language,
whose applications he claims to be boundless. He has extended the
alphabet’s visual aspect by providing each of the 26 lines
with its own color (aquamarine, Bordeaux red. etc.) and matching
noise (aha, brrbrr, sshssh, kdoink, etc.)
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so that Romboutese can
be appreciated aurally as well as orally.
Much of his work is based on quotations. For the “Initiatief
X6” exhibition, held in Gent, Belgium, he designed a complete
classroom in which the tables were English nouns. The seats were
in the form of the quotation “... harden to the object on which
we are sitting, and abstract nouns acquire the firmness of the table.”
(Stefan Thennerson, “Logic, Labels and Flesh”)
At the Bienale ‘87 in Sao Paulo. Brazil, Rombouts is one of
three artists representing Belgium. Rombouts will be showing both
with his classroom and a computer installation that generates Romboutese,
for which Teun de Lange wrote the program on an Apple 11 GS. The
program first processes the language, and then uses a ‘turtle’
to draw the word-picture on a large piece of paper. Rombouts sees
the program as a way to let other people use his very idiosyncratic
pictorial language creatively too.
More about Guy
Rombouts and Monica Droste
Guy Rombouts in Hyper
Space |
