Naoki Kawano’s MONOGRAM series is an exploration of letters as pure forms, detached from their inherent meanings. While the words themselves hold semantic value, within the context of these works, they serve only as lines, stripped of their linguistic significance. As a result, the formal qualities of the letters— their structure, composition, and brushwork— emerge, generating a dynamic rhythm and movement across the canvas.

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This approach resonates with various avant-garde movements of the 20th century. The Lettrist artists treated letters as visual elements, creating poetic spaces liberated from meaning. The Gutai artists focused on the act of creation itself, inscribing bodily movement onto the canvas. Likewise, MONOGRAM is less about painting with a brush and more about capturing the traces of the artist’s physical gestures. Here, the spontaneous and uncontrolled aesthetics of Art Informel are also reflected, emphasizing movement and raw expression.

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One can draw parallels to Cy Twombly’s unconscious scribbles, Jasper Johns’ deconstruction of symbols, and Francis Bacon’s exploration of distorted forms. Like these artists, Kawano’s works exist not to be read, but to be seen. Just as Bacon sought the essence of existence through the distortion of the human form, Kawano explores the fundamental structure and movement of letters. Rather than evoking emotions or memories as Twombly does, Kawano treats letters as purely visual elements, unlocking new possibilities within their abstracted forms.

MONGORAM exists at the intersection of writing and drawing, meaning and form, stillness and movement. The remnants of physical gestures transcend the meaning of the letters, offering viewers a novel visual experience.