Image: Alighiero Boetti, Simmeterie speculari, c. 1992
Galerie Mitterrand in Paris presents ‘Nothing to Read’, a group exhibition that treats writing less as a vehicle for meaning than as a visual, material and temporal form. The show opens on Monday 19 October 2026 at the gallery’s space at 95 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, during the MaSH Matignon/St-Honoré art night, and continues until 19 December 2026.
Fourteen artists are brought together: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Irma Blank, Alighiero Boetti, Betty Danon, Mirtha Dermisache, On Kawara, Jiří Kolář, Michael Krebber, Glenn Ligon, Henri Michaux, Roman Opałka, Mimmo Rotella, Gary Simmons and Christopher Wool.
According to the gallery, the exhibition follows the moment when letters turn into lines, words into shapes and repetition into rhythm. Language in these works is frequently erased, broken up or rendered illegible, yet it never entirely disappears.
Several of the artists work with writing cut loose from sense. Blank, Dermisache, Danon and Michaux use signs, scripts and invented writing systems. In 1974 the critic Gillo Dorfles described Blank’s practice as “asemantic writing”, in which signs stand for themselves rather than carrying a concept. Dorfles also connected Blank with Boetti through the measured, repeated movements of the hand that both artists rely on, gestures that make the hours spent on a work visible. In each case, small variations and irregularities keep the individual maker present inside the system.
Time is measured in other ways elsewhere in the show. On Kawara and Roman Opałka turn dates and numbers into records of lived duration. Glenn Ligon layers and repeats words until they hover between text and picture, while Mimmo Rotella works with letters and fragments of type taken from torn posters, the remains of a language that has already been altered.
The work chosen to introduce the exhibition is Boetti’s ‘Simmeterie speculari’ (c. 1992). The gallery frames the show as occupying the point at which writing can still be recognised, but reading it is no longer enough.
