Letras y figuras

   I would think the interesting aspect falls mainly in the way it seems to give letters concrete bodies (living and nonliving), but at a price. The bodies ''bend'' to the shapes of the letter, as if the letter were the master template that made them pliable to follow its shape. That is, the bodies are subordinate to the form of the letter, for which they ''sacrifice'' their own distinct morphology.

   Maybe its a good contrast to the notion of the abstract letter, whose ideal form and ideal non-form prevent it from becoming an object or a finished product. Letterforms are not static objects, but instead are vectors of a dynamic process (the metaplasmic history of alphabetical forms shows this). The ideal perfect letter and the ideal non-perfect letter are open-time convergence magnets, like the ''strange attractor'' concept in state space or phase space in dynamics. They are unrealizeable, and serve merely as the direction toward which the trajectory is moving, without this direction existing as a transcendent order (like Dante's God pulling all souls in).

   From a neo-materialist pov, the letter is merely an infinite set of virtualities or potentialities where each actualization is a sort of ''coordinate'' marking the intersection of forces, and where its path or timeline is not subordinate to an energetics beyond its own set of possible states. (The notion of non-essentialistic emergence of form, rough version). Hence, bodies don't bend to the letter but have their own processes, and, like the letter, are in constant stages of individuation. It is only in a symbolic regime that moments of letters and moments of bodies become locked up in a memory loop of redundancies and references, like the way they do perhaps in the letras y figuras. This ''feedback'' resonance is still part of the whole dynamic: the negentropic and homeostatic world of information and communication.

   But the visual punning can also be said to deconstruct the idealism of the letter by making us see how it was simply an illusion of perspective. When we look closer, the letterform vanishes into a myriad of other things, it is true, but things that have their own discrete ''concrete'' forms, the letter becoming nothing but a transparent holder or container of the real. It is a good illustration, though of how the ideal and the material gradients change hands by changing scales or frames. The letter seemed concrete from afar, then vanishes as an ideal upon closer look, giving way to ''real'' bodies. These "bodies," upon closer scrutiny, turn out to be only forms made from arranged paint or watercolor pigments following the idealized notions of ''color'' and “lines." The image of the body and the body of the image become indiscernible from one another. (You then say, how so like Magritte!)