What I am interested in as an artist is the compression, or stacking of language and information. I am interested in the translation from one mind to another, from written word to drawn composition. It is the automatic creation of new composition which happens when I translate another persons written thoughts into my designated medium and format that excites my exploration.

I paint with words. I paint with poetry. I paint with the geometry of chance. I paint with the words of Joseph Beuys, "The concept of a people is elementally coupled with its language".

The letters in the text are secondary, they disappear and reappear, it is the chance occurrence of shape and space that is created by the text that is of interest. When a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.., is used for instance, the composition created on
the paper, canvas, or sculpture, is directly dictated by the words
he formed into anti-war poetry perhaps forty years earlier. The text becomes of interest as a collaboration through space and time, ideology and thinking. When combining the words of one writer with another on the same canvas, as in my, "Conflict of Blood and Spirit" series, where I let Victor Frankel and Adolf Hitler battle it out from their opposing positions on life, ethics and morality, the resulting composition is made up of chance, ideology and history.

This idea and these paintings are also a reaction to, and a reflection of the trend of compressing information into smaller and smaller formats (spoken word to books / books to micro-film / micro-film to micro-chip / etc...) until the information itself is lost and all that is left to the understanding is the format. These paintings, drawings, collage and sculpture are a reaction to this compression of information.

Alexander Echo

"Alex Echo describes his methodology as compression. Stacking the letters from back to 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 netmaking of lines and gestures resulting in configurations, some dense and unrecognizable, others loose and suggestive, and some of the strongest pieces feel like childlike scribbles in chalk on the sidewalk.

What is interesting is that Echo's painting / drawing inform themselves not only from parts of the writing, 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 compositional resolution has been reached. That brings the work into the realm of conceptualists like Bochner and Onkawara. The concept is the form. It is the aesthetic rendition of each piece that differs greatly from the clarity of his predecessors. The pieces both gain aesthetic resolve yet loose 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 and letters which demonstrate a kind of rigid automatism of systematic paintings, but 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 contextual and the eventual. An odd mix of intellectualism and formalism, shot through the sensibility of an overall aesthetcian, Alex Echo refuses to decodify his works in either camp. He explores the tracing of text away from recognition, but willfully implants the paintings in the format of literary mechanisms and communication".

Marc Hungerbuhler