HISTORY OF THE LETTER
PEN & INK DRAWING
8.5 x 5.5 INCHES
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A giant book opens onto a stately presentable New York house. Built perhaps during the early 1900s the building’s solid façade stands out in sharp contrast to the soft facing of the book. The juxtaposition of well-worn paper with hard granite could draw an analogy to the elasticity of brain tissue and the toughness of the cranium-that human strongbox that holds our data of the past.
Human memory keeps the image of Venus, who was born from the font of the sea-a well-known metaphor of purity, beauty, infinity, and inexhaustible depth. The Birth of Venus was created by Sandro Botticelli more than 500 years ago, in 1485
The house takes up only so much space in the city, but human imagination has no limits and translates the images of the past into the framework of the present. It is worth noting how the symbolism of a book is similar to the symbolism of a residential building: as a page consists of parallel lines, an apartment block consists of parallel floors. Individual letters along those lines could be linked to individual faces looking out of the building’s windows.
