Laurens Rohlfs

About a year ago, I began to notice simplified pictograms of roads sweeping by along the highway, printed on trucks and on RVs. Despite the scaled-down images and the speed at which they passed me by, I could clearly read them as roads, narrowing towards the horizon. My eyes were drawn to their shared generic look, with only slight changes detectable, as if they were different versions of the same idea.

During a summer’s day while traveling in Germany, I saw a pictogram shaped like the letter A. The clarity of the sign – the idea road – was suddenly interrupted. Was it meant to represent a road, or was it a letter? Its communication was ambiguous, but the connection between distance and language made sense. I imagined that back then, when the alphabet was created, the letter A had taken its shape to resemble a road. Maybe it is a reminder of the gaps embedded in communication. As if to say, be aware of the distance between the world and our descriptions of it.