Asemic Love Notes (Undelivered) by James Edward Scherbarth

Seventy-two messages, all in red, none of them legible. The title admits they never arrived.

Asemic Love Notes (Undelivered) is by James Edward Scherbarth (1949-2021), dated 2020, in oil and cold wax on cradle board. Asemic writing is a practice in which an artist makes marks that behave like script but carry no readable words, leaving only the gesture of writing. Here nine rows of eight red daubs march down a pale gray-white ground. Each one is square-ish and dragged downward, with the paint thinning out at its lower edge, and no two match. It measures 36 inches wide by 40 high.

Some letters are better left to the imagination.