Seeing the eternal in a tumble of tiny letters

Bottom line: Elegant abstract works incorporating alphabet letters that conjure up surprising associations.

Tiny letters tumble through what looks like a vast, troubled sky in artist Margaret Fletcher’s paintings and works on paper. Like bodies hurling through space, e’s and o’s and l’s free fall. Is it a librarian’s lament about a written word in peril? The fever dream of a typographer? Artist and architect Margaret Fletcher’s unique, letter-based art is the focus of a memorable exhibition, “OCUS 11 ante litteram,” at the Westside Sandler Hudson Gallery. It’s the first solo show in Atlanta for the Alabama-based artist.

“Ante litteram” translates to “before the term existed,” and Fletcher’s work often seems to speak to matters of time and existence. She manages to make a poetic connection between her abstract forms and tiny alphabet letters and the human experience. Her work suggests a collision of the human — represented by the letters — and the eternal.

Wearer of many hats, the accomplished Fletcher is a Harvard-trained architect and currently a design consultant with the Atlanta firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, and also an assistant professor of architecture at Auburn University. If an architect’s creation lives in the world of the physical and tangible, then Fletcher’s art often feels like the inverse: ethereal and abstract. Don’t expect to decode some hidden message in the letters themselves, which won’t coalesce to spell “get out!” or “the meaning of life is …” But these artworks are apt to conjure up unexpected emotions and associations. Fletcher made her Atlanta debut in 2010 in a group show at Spruill Gallery, where her haunting, distinctive paintings featuring those letters encased in encaustic were both stark, minimalist and strangely emotional.

Working with many layers of wax that engulf her delicate letters, Fletcher’s artworks at Sandler Hudson are singularly focused on her recognizable imprints of human thought and creation: the alphabet. Using the lo-fi printing technique of dry transfer, Fletcher applies those impossibly minute insect-sized letters onto paper or canvas. She combines those letters with her more abstract forms and colors that engulf them in a primordial whirl. Encaustic works like “ante litteram 1:1” focus on dramatic, lava lamp pillars or stalactites of morphing color that flow and drip across the picture plane. Her letters sprout from those intense rust-orange furnaces or cluster into shapes that can suggest continents or maps.

It’s hard not to think of these tiny marks made by humans as stand-ins for human beings themselves, especially when Fletcher arranges them clinging in clusters to what look like tiny archipelagos in a “figura novalis,” or figure field. Letters are set against black forms in ink that look like islands reaching out into a white sea. Despite her very stark landscapes and simple forms, there is something tender and poetic about the circumstance she depicts, which seems to echo our own, of tiny figures lost in an enormous, swirling cosmos.

Fletcher’s artworks have a tension between the graphic and the metaphorical: They celebrate form, but they also evoke more ethereal pleasures. She takes something tangible and familiar in those letters and creates strange new associations. An uneasiness, but also a sense of calm is produced in experiencing the work, like finally surrendering to sleep.

Fletcher is often at her best when she is keeping things simple. Her more complex multicolor encaustic works, which often juxtapose those tiny letters with thick, topographic forms in wax, can mix a strange, otherworldly form with these emblems of civilization. But it is her more stark, clean works in black and white like “rlung,” in which black letters cluster like starlings in the sky, bunched in tight groups and then spread out against white paper, that arrest for their delicate, simple beauty. Also memorable is a series of 14 works, “azureus novalis,” in which clouds of white letters are set against soft, watery colors — muddy yellow, grey and blue — that suggest the gradations of the sky throughout the day.

In many ways, Fletcher’s work seems to evoke the act of creation, whether the artist’s or the architect’s or, on a grander scale, of the universe itself.