Georges Noël was fascinated by handwriting from an early age, as he found it in his father's account books, stenographs, signatures (like that of Friedrich Nietzsche). His paintings often look like large curved signatures in which the artist's signature itself is hidden in some corner. But his writing also has echoes of the strokes of cuneiform or the Celtic Ogham alphabet, and sometimes (as in Klee's work) single letters are interspersed. In any case, they are writings that still await their meaning, that is, ORIGINAL WRITINGS, PRE-SCRIPTURES, whereby they secure for the painter's work a timelessness that defies all fashions. He is abstract and concrete at the same time, outlining the possibility space of writing. He develops a metaphysics, not by taking off into the void, but by dealing directly with the materials and the material. Like the child admiring his sand cake, he stays close to his own creation. (Text: Rainer G. Schmidt)