Breaking Lines: Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry review – the beauty of art made by typewriter | Art and design

The typewriter drawings of a British Benedictine monk in the swinging 60s are so startling they deserve a sheaf of exclamation marks (although he himself barely used them). Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-92) was always sparing with the punctuation, and so modest of spirit that on his artworks his name invariably appears in lower case. Sometimes it is typed in a vertical configuration – dsh – running down the page like a tiny Japanese inscription. Which is apt, for all of dsh’s “typewritings” amount to a foreign language.

Which is to say that although his works are composed of the letters and punctuation marks of an old manual Olivetti, they are not meant to be read so much as viewed. And what you see, on the framed A4 pages he liked to use, can be almost entirely abstract. A shifting pattern of dots, whirling constellations of commas, a vibration of hyphens that is something like visual interference. There is a beautiful work in the Estorick Collection in which a dense field of oblique strokes is interrupted by a single line of brackets, running diagonally up the sheet, which might be read as a ripple in water or time.

What is so surprising is the way Houédard’s images hold the page so powerfully as to suppress all curiosity about which letters he is using. A figure seems to be walking upstairs, or perhaps it is downstairs. There is no figure; there are no stairs. In fact there are only innumerable hyphens. But so superb, and subtle, is the configuration of all these fractional lines that it seems as if someone is ascending, or descending, through a body of air.

Only imagine how on earth Houédard did this. He is not drawing with a pencil, painting with a brush, or etching with a needle. The interplay between his fingers – pressing down on the keys, turning the page this way and that – and the final image on the wall is frankly fantastical. It requires him to establish every mark in his mind’s eye, long in advance of typing. The obvious, if remote, analogy is with weaving on the warp and weft of a loom.

Take a beautiful work in this show (as so often, untitled). Three overlapping discs shimmer like planets seen through mist. The effect is at first purely visual: of a glimmering and filmic translucency, ultimately evocative of moonlight. And the method may appear entirely simple. Lines of intermittent length, and stepped positions, reach across the page: it might almost be a drawing. But each line is composed of complex variations of typewriter keys – hyphens, underscores, equal signs, and a most refined overlay of full stops. And Houédard uses black over blue, here and there, to deepen or darken the light.

The artist, who spent most of his life at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire, with sporadic trips to the London gallery scene, was a theologian and poet as well as a monk. He is shown here within the context of concrete poetry. There are word works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing and Edwin Morgan alongside, and they all have in common that notion that the form of a poem – its typograph structure and appearance – could carry as much impact as the words themselves. Cobbing’s 1967 Chamber Music, with its dozen starbursts of words, perfectly regular at a distance, explosively disparate on closer inspection, is a famous instance. But listen to it as an archived performance and it is immediately apparent that the sound was easily as significant as the visual arrangement.

And so it seems with the opening room of this fascinating show, which is dedicated to the ultra-radical word works of the futurists in prewar Italy. Here is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s shrieking manifesto, with its bold, upper case exclamations, and the marvellous graphics of the slogan Parole in Libertà (words in freedom) as they appeared in newspapers and magazines. Letters making faces, buildings or planets, snaking round and round, clambering up and down pyramids. Everything is urgent, emphatic, gunfire-direct; black on white, these words dazzle and shock, and one can imagine them shouted in blasts. But they are, fundamentally, written words.

Whereas Houédard is making something more enigmatic and silent, often and evidently contemplative. Some of his works feature only one dot, repeated in spirals that seem to expand the space of the page. Others have spiritual titles, referring to the religions of India or ancient Greece. “i see my typestracts as icons depicting sacred questions – dual space-probes of inner & outer”, he wrote in 1972. But they might also be viewed “like cloud-tracks & tide-ripples – bracken-patterns & gull flights – or simply as horizons & spirit levels”.

Houédard could be droll and epigrammatic. A work titled elitist observation (no capitals, no quote marks) presents a vertical polyhedron bearing down on a flattened blue counterpart, at a distinct angle and in abrasive scarlet. You get the point, so to speak. Indeed it is wonderful to see how brilliantly Houédard deployed the limited colours of Olivetti ink ribbons, in juxtaposition, alone or in overlay. He even used the soft and slightly blurred register of carbon copies to introduce a more ancient or spectral appearance.

Collages, cut-ups and concrete poems: dsh made them all at one time or another. But the works in this show are more original and austere. Marks not bound by word, sentence, rhythm or line, they are simply beautiful images in their own right – a constant interplay between mind, hand and eye; between man and typewriting machine.