JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 19
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looking to conclude, discover cause and effect, or arrive at singular, predefined
outcomes, but instead to hold things lightly, maintaining ambiguity and
continuous meaning-making. Deleuze writes, "The theory of thought is like a
painting: It needs that revolution which took art from representation to
abstraction" (Deleuze, 1994, p. 276). A release from fixed identities and forms to
differences based on emergence and fluidity connects my love of narrative to my
appreciation for aesthetic abstraction. Let's briefly look at the work of Cecil
Touchon to celebrate the deliverance of language and imagery from conventions
of ordering and structure. As a narrative therapist, artist, and bricoleur, Touchon
motivates me to reactivate ready-made language and psychology's codes into
handmade, generative assemblages.
Type Token ~ Cecil Touchon, 2009
Cecil Touchon (born 1956) is an American painter, collagist, and performance
artist who explores abstraction within typography and liberates language from its
sites of origin and meaning. As a "visual poet," he states, "My work is a challenge
to the difference between representationalism and abstraction because language
in general has always been used in modern times as a representational medium"
(Artscope, 2014, para. 3). He adds, "& I'm releasing the forms from their task of
being the bearers of meaning. The meaning becomes something completely
different & it's like I'm freeing the letters from their work" (Touchon, n.d., para.
4). Touchon deconstructs the literal for us to create handmade abstractions that,
like Duchamp's artwork, rupture language's foreshadowed roles and contexts. I
hope for the freedom of abstraction that becomes possible when we move away
from the customs of language representation to re-access the virtual and
difference-in-itself.
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practices – Part Two
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2025 Release, p. 5-28.
www.journalnft.com
