Kosrof is an Ethiopian-born artist whose work embraces, incorporates and explores the aesthetics of his native Amharic, one of the few ancient written systems in Africa and itself derived from the more ancient language, Ge'ez. He breaks apart its calligraphic forms, abstracting and reconfiguring them into his own visual language. Like many of your other text-like works, he embraces and exploits the look of the symbols and ignores their textural meanings, making an abstract visual rather than literal story. His technique draws on an Ethiopian literary tradition of “wax and gold”. This poetic verse contains the literal meaning, the wax, and their hidden and actual meaning, the gold. He sees the inspirational language symbol as his “wax” with the new visuals, exaggerated and distorted as the “gold”.