"Insha 'Alla" Steel sculpture, render #1, Highway Installation /Dubai,U.A.E, Dimensions Variable

"Art 'lives' through influencing other art, not by existing as a physical residue of an artist 's ideas.The reason why different artists from the past are 'brought alive' again is because some aspect of their work becomes 'useable' by living artists. That there is 'no truth as to what art is' seems quite unrealized."
Joseph Kosuth,1969

"The idea becomes a machine that makes art."
Sol LeWitt,1967.

These paintings, these sculptures, drawings and collages are all part of a larger work, a life 's work. They are each rungs on a ladder from which this artist climbs onto the shoulders of previous artists in a perpetual desire to see further. Never have I created a "single" work of art. Instead, each new piece is an experiment in aesthetic engineering. With every new work I attempt to construct a bridge to a new idea.

Living in today's high-speed and compressed world, with headlines and sound-bites as news, and with the entire world 's history at my finger tips on the internet, as an artist I can not help but react to this compression with equal compression. My work is about the layering or stacking of information and language: piling image on top of image, or fitting ten pages of text on to one page, or 100 letters where there should only be one.

More importantly my work is about collaboration. When the words of Albert Einstein or Blaise Pascal are used, for instance, as the point of departure for one of my paintings -it is their words that direct and create the paintings final look. It is the author's pattern of thought that dictates the outcome of my painting. Thus my work is pure collaboration, be it with a writer from five minutes ago or five-thousand years ago.

I use collage, paint, ink, glue and history. I stand on I stand on the shoulders of the artists before me in an effort not to make art - but rather to make sense.
A.E.

The work of Alex Echo begins with collaboration and compression. His translation of language or printed matter to image is based on a direct and literal logic, that of form. Alex uses meaningful words in an arbitrary pictorial fashion. He uses the text to dictate the formal approach and the sequence of the mark-making to inform his free interpretation of such letters, -l,e,t,t,e,r,- each letter as a sequential part of the overall composition. Echo describes this methodology as compression, stacking letters from the back to the front rather than from left to right, similar to an additive sculptor who lays or attaches one piece of steel on/to another. Echo's process leads to a net-making of lines and gestures resulting in configurations, some dense and unrecognizable, others loose and suggestive and some of the strongest pieces feel childlike scribbles in chalk on the sidewalk.

What is interesting is that Echo's painting/drawing/collage informs themselves not only from the parts of the writing or imagery,but also from its volume. Say a text is forty words long,another four hundred, Echo always uses the entire text regardless of his growing composition. Directed by his conceptual approach, Alex will not stop adding words to his piece even if the composition resolution has been reached. The concept is the form. The pieces both gain aesthetic resolve yet loose conceptual clarity through their sophisticated formal packaging.The structures that evolve from Echo's work reflect therefore a concise methodology down to the numeric amount of marks/ images/letters which demonstrate a kind of rigid automatism of systemic paintings, while ultimately questioning the importance of literary content in the context of the art making process. Words are building blocks to arrive at meaning in a communicative sense.This artist searches for formal accidentiality by roughly transposing the meaning of the words, the previous, the next,the conceptual and the eventual. An odd mix of intellectualism and formalism, shot through the sensibility of an overall aesthetician, Alex Echo refuses to decode his works in either camp. He explores the tracing of text and the compression of imagery in the context of abstraction, letting the image freeform itself away from recognition.

Does writing or the written word serve as a pure motor to fuel his gestural compositions, or is Echo Õs aim to debase the literary format as another Òready made Óthrow away item at the disposal of additional content in his art?

Who ever said that a pile of words leading to profundity contains intrinsic formal value?

M.H.

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