‘dsh: optimism is natural but a little excessive’ at TINA, London, United Kingdom

24 November 2025

From 6 December 2025 – 14 March 2026, TINA presents ‘dsh: optimism is natural but a little excessive’, an exhibition of framed works on paper, made with an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter by Dom Sylvester Houédard dated from the 1960s and 70s.

What appears at first as playful experiments with mechanical keystrokes and grids, as marks made on paper, could be better understood as the implosion of language’s very function. These typstracts are neither text nor image but the place where writing sabotages its own communicative promise and the image, despite legible forms, collapses into a complex unreadability. They expose the typewriter as a machine that, once stripped of semantic service, generates only an excess of form. Marks without meaning, grids that shimmer only to dissolve, punctuation that refuses to punctuate. Language as an image, the aesthetic form of language, and the simultaneous dependence and incommensurability of both.

Houédard’s typestracts exemplify this antagonism by layering one order upon another. The work produces not synthesis but interference, a flickering that destabilizes perception. They are not necessarily beautiful patterns but instead ontological accidents, visual stutters where meaning short-circuits. Each form asserts its identity only to immediately undermine it, as though every stroke of the key carries within it the anticipation of erasure.

Find out more via TINA.

Image: Dom Sylvester Houédard, acid intersection, 1971, Typed page, 33 x 20.2 cm, 13 x 8 in, Courtesy of Lisson Gallery