Bio
Born in Belgium in 1964, Philip Wittmann lives and works in Brussels. A self-taught artist, he began painting at the age of 27 while undergoing psychoanalysis. What began as a personal exploration gradually developed into a decades-long investigation into language, signs, and the ambiguity of meaning and interpretation.
Wittmann first exhibited his work in Brussels in 2019. Since then, his work has been presented internationally in Belgium, China, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.
Artist Statement
Wittmann explores the ambiguity of language and the ways in which perception, interpretation, personal experience, and both conscious and unconscious processes contribute to the construction of meaning.
For him, language is never entirely neutral or unambiguous. A sentence as simple as “I went to the sea yesterday” may evoke very different images, memories, and emotions in each person. Words may also be understood differently depending on cultural background, education, personal history, or individual frames of reference. Part of this understanding is conscious; another part develops more diffusely through memories, associations, and emotions that partly escape our control.
Language therefore makes communication possible while constantly leaving room for interpretation, divergence, and sometimes misunderstanding.
Wittmann pushes this ambiguity further by creating his own signs. Belonging to no known alphabet, they carry no predetermined meaning. Their creation itself takes place at the intersection of the conscious and the unconscious: certain forms, rhythms, and compositions result from deliberate choices, while others emerge intuitively, without a clearly formulated intention.
Although devoid of defined meaning, these signs nevertheless give the impression that they are meant to signify something. They confront the viewer with an instinctive need to understand and assign meaning. Unable to translate or decipher them, the viewer projects onto them personal references, memories, emotions, and associations, whether conscious or unconscious. The same work can therefore give rise to profoundly different interpretations.
By inventing a language that cannot truly be deciphered, Wittmann does not seek to eliminate meaning, but to question how and where it is formed. Meaning is no longer determined solely by the intention of the person expressing something, nor by what is expressed itself; it emerges through the encounter between expression and reception.
His work thus explores the gap between what is expressed and what is understood, between conscious and unconscious, intention and projection. It ultimately raises a broader question: where is meaning truly constructed — in the intention of the person expressing something, in what is expressed, or in the interpretation of the person receiving it?
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It Concerns Me!
Lecture by Marc Segers, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, at the Odradek Exhibition, on June 7th 2024.
I. Introduction
First, a big thank you to Simone Schuiten for inviting us, not only to speak to you this evening but especially to reflect, develop, and shape all the questions, mysteries, enigmas, charms, and subtleties that this exhibition carries for us.
Before we begin, we must say from where we speak: we are not semioticians, not artists, not philosophers, not specialists in anything, not art historians either—just people interested in art and psychoanalysis.
It is this interest that led us, four years ago, along with some psychoanalyst colleagues from the Association of the Freudian Cause, to set up a seminar that aimed to explore the relationships that these two fields, art and psychoanalysis, can maintain: psychoanalysis can help us see art better, but conversely, art also helps to illuminate psychoanalysis. This is what Lacan signified with his famous homage to Marguerite Duras in 1965: "…remember with Freud that in his field, the artist always precedes the psychoanalyst, and that he therefore does not have to play the psychologist where the artist leads the way." In other words, the psychoanalyst does not have to psychoanalyze an artist or a work, but rather to learn from what the artist and their work can teach him.
And if we called our seminar "The Art's Saying," it is in reference to someone’s question in a seminar in 1977, asking if art was not something pre-verbal, something before speech. He replied: "I am trying to say that art, in its occasion, is beyond symbolism... I believe there is more truth in the saying of art than in any bla-bla... It is not a pre-verbal, it is a verbal to the second power." A verbal squared, therefore: in art, there is something that says more than long speeches, and that says what long speeches cannot.
I will return to psychoanalysis later.
Here, the bla-bla we are going to propose will only make sense if it allows us to see better or to see more than what the two artists show us. They precede us, meaning it is up to us now to try to see after them what they took so much time and creativity to develop, and to teach us.
So let us begin with the generic theme that unites the two artists present here, but which is also a theme dear to the gallery and the Odradek project.
II. Asemic Dialogue: What Does That Mean?
A dialogue is a conversation between two people on a defined subject. In philosophy, for example, we know the dialogues of Socrates.
Asemic refers to writing that does not rely on clear or precise linguistic meaning, that has no specific semantic content. It is therefore outside meaning. However, it distinguishes itself from abstract art by retaining the physical characteristics of writing, such as lines and symbols.
In the case of Philip and Aika, Odradek proposes a dialogue between them, i.e., a form of discourse aimed at advancing a questioning, based on their shared interest in a certain relationship with writing, which includes signs but without semantic content, meaning outside meaning. They began this questioning with their works. And we will try to continue it, with our modest means and our limitations.
A sign then? It is a perceived thing that refers to the existence or truth of another thing to which it is linked, and which allows it to be distinguished and recognized. It has synonyms like index, mark, manifestation, signal, symbol. In linguistics, since Ferdinand de Saussure, it is a dual-faced entity, one sensible, which is the signifier, i.e., the acoustic image, material, the sound form that we hear or the graphic symbol that we see; and the other, the signified, i.e., the concept or idea that the sign represents. Note that there is no natural relationship between the signifier and the signified.
Insofar as it concerns semantics (semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies the meaning and significance of words), and since we are dealing here with two artists from very different cultures, one Western, the other Japanese, it is difficult not to evoke Roland Barthes. Philosopher and semiotician, he has always been interested in the signs and meanings they convey. He starts from the principle that the meaning of a sign, whatever it may be, always lies in the relationship it has with other signs. A sign does not exist alone. It is included in networks of signs.
If we want to extract meaning from the signs we perceive, we must then focus on the networks of relationships they weave among themselves. Strongly interested, and more than that, attracted to Japan, he demonstrated this in an important book: "Empire of Signs." He demonstrates the difference and often the opposition between two networks of relationships between signs, between two systems therefore: one is the West, the other is Japan.
These differences between systems are marked for him in writing as well as in the way of eating, preparing food, living in a house, building cities, making theater, poetry, being polite, designing a garden... i.e., constructing a world.
After this long preamble, necessary in our view to give landmarks to what we are talking about and not to get lost in complex considerations, let us now come to the works that surround us. I will speak about Philip's work, and Christiane about Aika's.
III. Philip
In Philip's works, the first impression, which one immediately grasps, is that it is about writing. At first glance, we do not think of simple lines or drawings. It is indeed signs that we are dealing with. In this case, signs that evoke, without being them, the signs of Asian languages, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, where the boundaries between drawing, painting, calligraphy, and writing become blurred. Sometimes they appear in series that succeed and align with each other, sometimes they intermingle. And, as Barthes says, each sign being supposed to have a relationship with other signs to form a meaning, this meaning, inevitably, we seek it, it should be there, in the background of what we see.
The temptation is therefore strong, at least for us Westerners, to see in these signs signifiers, referring to signifieds, something that opens up to a meaning. We are tempted to think that there is something to understand, a secret meaning to decipher. And since, of course, this resists, we rush to the title that should enlighten us. Except that it does not enlighten anything at all. Thus, there is a tension between a network of obscure signs that resist any understanding, signs that do not lend themselves to the division signifier-signified, and a title in which we indeed find meaning, a signified, but which has nothing to do with the succession or intertwining of signs. In other words, while Philip's writing is fundamentally asemic, i.e., fundamentally outside meaning, meaning is still invoked by the title. And we cling to the title to escape this vertigo that seizes us when we cannot latch onto something known and familiar.
This is where Philip first appears to be a Western artist, even if his signs may evoke the East. Western rationality indeed has a hard time, as Barthes reminds us, accepting the outside meaning. If something exists, it must have meaning. "The West moistens everything with meaning," he says. And he talks about the means employed in the West to "avoid the disgrace of nonsense." Barthes takes haikus as an example: "I arrive by the mountain path. Ah! This is exquisite! A violet."
Or: "Already four o'clock... I got up nine times... to admire the moon."
Or this again: "In the fisherman's house, the smell of dried fish... and the warmth."
The West will always try to see in these three-line verses a symbol, a metaphor, or a syllogism; meaning, something to understand. This is not the case in Japan where the reading of haiku aims, on the contrary, to suspend meaning, to shake it, to make it fall. Like the koan or the blow of the Zen master's stick, which aim each time to awaken the disciple, to disconnect him from meaning and the imaginary to confront him with the real.
This is what, in my eyes, Philip's work is attached to: "I give you this to see. You want to find meaning in it. I encourage you by giving a title. I even attract you by giving it all a beautiful aesthetic packaging. And then, wham, there is none. There is nothing, it is the absence."
Well, this is exactly the function of interpretation in psychoanalysis. We suffer from too much meaning. We do not know how to do without it. Our symptoms are the fruit of meaning, conscious, and especially unconscious, which clutters us and permeates and invades everything that happens in our lives. Contrary to what one might think, psychoanalysis does not aim to give meaning to symptoms: it is because those who suffer from them are burdened by them, it is because these symptoms contain unconscious meaning, it is because there is an excess of meaning, often contradictory and incompatible, in the unconscious, that these symptoms emerge. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, aims to dry up meaning, to reduce it, to remove its layers, to free the subject from the meanings that clutter him. Lacan dreamed of achieving interpretations that would have the power of the Zen koan. The koans are very short quotes in the form of absurd enigmas, which precisely aim to abandon reasoning or any other intellectual consideration to confront the real. For example: "Can an illusion exist?" or "Each truth has four corners. Here is one corner, you find the other three."
Philip's works function a bit like this for me: they lead us into the search for meaning, but the more we look for it, the more it escapes us. The signifiers we see remain mute. No signified comes to support them. Just as the koan in Zen Buddhism aims to create an experience of pure presence, the very absence of meaning in Philip's works becomes a presence, and it is this absence that becomes the subject of the work.
IV. Conclusion
It is precisely here that the asemic dialogue between Philip and Aika unfolds. The absence of meaning in their works does not signify emptiness but invites the viewer into an active contemplation. It's an invitation to experience the work beyond the confines of rational interpretation, to engage with it in a way that is both profound and elusive, much like the Zen koans that Philip's work recalls. In doing so, they transcend the boundaries between language, art, and meaning, and create a space where the viewer is invited to find their own path in the labyrinth of signs, where sometimes, the only thing to find is the beauty of the labyrinth itself.
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IN-SIGNIFICANT SIGNS?
Imagine an art lover who admires, among others, the lines on paper by Dotremont or Alechinsky. He loves them, is drawn to them, because he himself has always been fascinated by markings... Now consider the same person, captivated by Chinese calligraphy, by its apparent ability to draw what it expresses while first showing an elegant fluidity in the brushstroke.
Isn't it through steps and traces that humanity set itself in motion? Philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Max Loreau—the latter being close to the two artists mentioned above) have shown this. Before any formed cultural language, advancing toward our birth, the walls of Lascaux bear witness to this wonder...
Like any artist seeking regeneration in art, Philip Wittmann embarks on this journey. A journey that will not remain indebted to those who initially attracted him. He is wary of the illusions of spontaneity as well as the allure of primitivism—perhaps a caution arising from his professional activity, for he is a man of business. Yet, he does not give up on the freedom of marking... How to proceed?
Still on paper, Wittmann draws with a brush, as if writing alphabetically with a pen, as he says. He dips it into Indian ink, often black, sometimes colored, occasionally using walnut stain...
Parallel to his first attempts, by chance but also following his past fascinations, after a period of trial and error, he notices recurring lines emerging. He places them in regular boxes resembling a Mendeleev table, realizing they form something like an alphabet. With this, he creates not words or sentences with precise, too-defined meanings, but rather the manifestation of a desire—to present signs to the eye that, if not enigmatic, are at least open to the viewer's imagination.
Thus, these sign-paintings emerge, born from games both structured and arbitrary, of imaginary combinations, and entanglements with drawings as joyful as they are scrutinizing, whose titles, such as "The Pleasure in the Face of Decision," provoke our playful perplexity.
Here are Philip Wittmann's Insignificant Signs: they are as much an invitation to our free interpretation as they are to our aesthetic pleasure.
Éric Clémens, Philosopher and writer, September 2019