Visual Poetry in Europe

Stathis Chrissicopulos - Libagione (2015)

These are ideas and concepts of the aesthetics of rupture that, with declamatory prose, Tzara had explored in the Dada Manifesto of 1918: “The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders-locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation.”

Vladimir Smoylar - Tractatus (2015)

It was, and still is, a question of replacing the old with a new way of doing: a renewed poetic of symbols, for example, able to juxtapose, overlap, assemble and incorporate writing with image, drawing, graphics, photography, collage, décollage. To reach – as in the case of this particular collection of Imago Mundi artworks – the artistic dimension of Visual Poetry, a phenomenon that began to develop in the Fifties, in the fiery climate of European neo-avant-garde.

Antic-Ham - R (2015)

The close and versatile relationship between image and the written word has ancient origins. In addition to having a sense and a sound related to linguistic conventions, the letters – the graphemes – are also graphic symbols that derive from images. For example, it is thought that the letter “A”, the first letter of the Roman alphabet and of many other alphabets, derives from the transcription of the Phoenician word alph (bull) whose graphic symbol was used for its resemblance, in the Phoenician script, to a bull’s head.

Mauro Dal Fior - La poesia s’onora! (2015)

In the 1918 work Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire, the graphic arrangement of words on the page forms a drawing. Combining the Greek adjective kalós (beautiful) and the noun gramma (from gráphõ, writing in Greek), the word calligram itself underscores how the script is a form of beauty. The French poet draws on a tradition of the Middle Ages – at the time these exercises in writing were called carmina figurata – and emphasizes how a calligram is an amalgamation of symbols, drawing and thought. For him the word is liberated from its instrumental role and becomes an art object: “Et moi aussi, je suis peintre.”

Luc Fierens - Violetta (2015)

The onomatopoeic effect becomes the protagonist in the free words (or Words-In-Freedom) of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist poet who rebelled against, and went beyond, the composure of the written page: “Instead we use all the brutal sounds, all the expressive cries of the violent life that surrounds us. Let us boldly create the “ugly” in literature and kill solemnity wherever it may be. And don’t put on those high-priest airs when you listen to me. We must spit every day on the Altar of Art. We are entering the limitless domains of free intuition. After free verse, here at last are words in freedom!”

Franco Spena - Imago Cordis Mundi (2015)

Again in the early decades of the twentieth century, another artist, Paul Klee departed from painting to write in a completely different way, creating, in this case, a relationship between text, shapes and colours. A good example is the work Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, a poem written in German in 1918 and represented in delicate watercolour. Each letter is inserted in a square, in turn subdivided into other geometric shapes by the letter it contains. The colour choices vary according to the concepts expressed in the text, so the grey of the night is in dull tones, fire is matched to red, blue is a prevalence of cold tones.

Carmine Lubrano - Tarantelle Poetry (2015)

In the Thirties, Klee deepened the relationship between text and image by inventing the so- called pseudo-graphemes, minimal symbols of a new primitive alphabet that strongly resembled hieroglyphics and Eastern scripts. And, fifty years later, but not very far removed from the poetics of Klee, Alighiero Boetti created beautifully embroidered fabrics; geometric grids of coloured letters in which sequences often lose their verbal sense to become playful. His daughter Agata recently recalled (in the book Gameplan): “My father’s work is a game, a multitude of games, very different from the complex, intellectual analysis voiced by the critics.”

Josef Bauer - Red (2015)

Since the Sixties, the relationship between word and image – and consequently the relationship between art and literature – has become part of a chaotic and vibrant universe that includes artistic movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus, Body Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. This was clearly evident in the exhibition The word in art at the Mart of Rovereto in 2007, which brought together paintings, drawings, posters, art books, literary works, collages and large installations, whose focus was “the sublime hybrid of the cross-fertilization of the languages of art.”

Ludo Frateur - La personne (2015)

Concentrated in the 10x12 cm format, the radiance of the text-image, instead of being diminished by the miniature form, appears to undergo a revival, driven by the imagination of the artists opening themselves to new spaces of iconic-poetic symbolism. This intriguing collection reminds us that every artistic language, of word and of image, is both the riddle and its solution. And it is above all – in the words of the poet, art critic and ingenious experimenter Emilio Villa – an amazing way to advance, beyond appearances and without prejudice, in the infinite creation of the world:

“and always before, way before, so you can almost enunciate the form or speak the figure, the water has already spoken on its own, now et ab aeterno, everything and the original footprint.”