I suppose it was the admiration I felt for the Tlacuilos (artist/scribes of pre-Columbian Mexico) that got me started on making codices of my own. My interest in these works — they usually took the form of screenfold books — was not only in the great artistic quality of many of them, but also in the curious pictorial makeup of the texts, which seemed to operate in a realm moving back and forth between drawing and writing. I was intrigued by the use they made of almost every conceivable graphic convention — especially the great Mixtec codices in which pictograms, ideograms, signs, symbols, phonetic glyphs, rebus symbols, a language of accumulated repetitions, a grammar of juxtaposed color, all come into play with each other. There is no decorative feature. Every form, line, color signifies something.

Codices dealt with subjects as ethereal as the history and motivations of the gods, auguries, incantations and such, to maps, charts, and even the banalities of land tithes, tax accounts and inventories. Theirs is a visual idiom with a highly charged pictorial vocabulary of remarkable inventiveness. The various codices I have made have become part of an on going project that has served me well as a source book for my work in painting and sculpture. With each codex I try to get involved with different pictorial themes and develop a visual vocabulary particular to each one. I made a codex in the form of a diary, in which I did a page every day at the same hour, another based on images of a Moviola; Voice Prints; the codex Itzpapalotl based on six different pre-Columbian codices, and the Madero Codex, which relates to the visual world of games and puzzles.

I like to poke about and explore. Consider this: When does a drawing become writing, writing become drawing? After all we can read a painting, see a text in a tree. Is music speech? Or the other way round?

But then art always gravitates to its own element: play. The key to imagination’s door that leads us to where lines go between, forms deform, dots do their thing, color shapes itself, and space shuttles. All this makes more than meets the eye. These codices invoke a certain feeling of kinship with the Tlacuilos. So I like to hang out with them in what has become one of my favorite pictorial playgrounds.

Brian Nissen