Down & Dirty: "Reading" the Visual Poetry of Robin Tomens

  

I had to Close My Eyes. 2025. Typed text, carbon transfers.

British visual poet, collagist, and author Robin Tomens has been “hard at it” for quite some time (evidently since the Punk era—visit his blog HERE), and it shows in the typed vispo he frequently shares on social media. His work balances dense clouds of text and angular or serpentine typed lines against broad, organic smudges, with weathered surfaces bearing the trace of hand-drawn, carbon-transferred elements throughout. These textural and graphic components are often combined with images and bold, flag-like fields of colour. The typed elements—substantial arrays of non-semantic characters (letters and symbols)—are frequently juxtaposed with minimal, epigrammatic lines such as “There’s just two kinds of people: my kind of people and assholes” creating a sharp tension between improvised, stochastic patterning and aphoristic clarity.

While Tomens’ work spans a wide spectrum of approaches, I’ve been particularly drawn to his recent pieces featuring text-cloud and map-like configurations (The Pledge (Text by Borges), 2024, and I Had to Close My Eyes, 2025). These works achieve a deft balance between negative and positive space, elegantly echoing the contrast between semantic and non-semantic text. As an artist whose practice has largely centered on drawing, I find the graphic elements especially compelling. Sinuous, fine lines weave over and through the text, intersecting with gentle gestural scuffs and smears, while precisely ruled elements appear in subtle geometric configurations—all part of Tomens’ visual toolkit, deployed with controlled spontaneity.

The Pledge (Text by Borges). 2024. Typed text, carbon transfers.

The drawn elements in these works operate on multiple levels. In I Had to Close My Eyes, 2025, the fine structural line-work creates a dispersed web of visual information that both grounds and destabilizes the text—functioning less like a fixed system than a shifting network. This line-work appears in several forms: serpentine passages (suggestive of rivers or topographical contours), fine rectilinear lines (implying axes, grids, or coordinates), and faint, nervous marks that hover between notation and language, evoking asemic writing. The presence of lightly drawn circles—some intersecting, some isolated—further reinforces a cartographic or diagrammatic logic, as if marking points of interest or zones of attention. In both works, additional surface details—smears, stains, creases, and abrasions—introduce a tactile grit that not only grounds the composition materially but also suggests processes of accumulation.

Tomens’ drawn elements, interwoven with both linear and cloud-like text arrangements, can be read as speculative mappings of urban or cognitive space, where streets, pathways, and nodes emerge through improvisational layering rather than fixed design. In The Pledge (Text by Borges), 2025, the vertical concentration of typed characters creates a dense, almost columnar mass, out of which a legible textual fragment emerges cutting across the field in a declarative manner. This moment of clarity, drawn from a 1922 essay by Jorge Luis Borges, anchors the otherwise turbulent field of non-semantic characters, producing a striking contrast between legibility and noise. Across both works, aphoristic and borrowed text acts as a stabilizing force, briefly organizing perception before dissolving back into visual complexity.

In collapsing boundaries between semantic and non-semantic language while merging visual and linguistic registers, Tomens constructs a flâneur-like, contemplative space—a visual-textual ecology in which perception, language, and lived experience converge. The works invite sustained engagement, not as puzzles to be solved but as environments to be navigated, where meaning flickers in and out of focus amid the layered density of marks, gestures, and fragments.

Lastly, in parting I'm happy to share here an animated "reading" combining both of Tomens' work I've been happy to share and "discuss" here.