Pascal Vonlanthen and his seven siblings grew up on the family farm in Rossens, a village in the Canton of Fribourg. Until his retirement, he worked as a caretaker at FARA, a Fribourg-based charity providing employment and sheltered housing for people with disabilities. He has also attended CREAHM, an art workshop for people with learning difficulties, for two days a week since its foundation in 1998.

Vonlanthen’s earliest drawings from the workshop depicted farm animals and various fantastical beasts. With time, he began incorporating letters into his works, using a narrower colour palette and adopting a more graphical approach. Since 2014, Vonlanthen has fully embraced this new vocabulary with a series of “writings”. He cannot read: instead, he copies text from other sources – in most cases, free daily newspapers. These works are a simulacrum of writing, with individual letters reproduced repeatedly and in an increasingly abstract fashion. In contrast to the rigidity of typefaces, Vonlanthen’s calligraphic writings are stacked in columns and flow across the page like waves. His compositions sometimes blend letters and images – animals and embryonic forms – such that the text takes on a figurative significance. For their purely visual elegance, Vonlanthen’s writings have an irresistible appeal that transcends the boundaries of language.