Alain Arias-Misson — Love, a meta-concretist poetic meditation

+++ This exhibition ran from 18 January to 25 February 2024. +++

My new flat work I call ‘meta-concretism’ to mark its boundaries between ‘concrete poetry’ and ‘visual poetry’. I practiced a concretist, then a visual poetics for many years – in the latter there is a dialectic of printed or handwritten words – and fragmentary images. This form has become very common today, dozens of magazines and books and galleries show it. My sense is that the trend has become a ‘potpourri’, a stew into which anything is dumped. Painters, poets, graphic artists, cartoonists, publicists mixt text and image, now hundreds do this with digital media, and it has lost its ‘edge’, its identity. It has become boring.

The beauty of concrete poetry and the early visual poetry such as Apollinaire and Laurence Sterne, was that it derived from an authentic poetic intuition. Only poets did it. That is why I have returned to the rigor of Concrete Poetry, with a primary focus on the material presence of letters and eventually words, and techniques of combination and permutation of letters –  performed through the agency of the subordinate image; in the case of my own form: meta-concretism. I have recently done several series in this spirit – “The Concrete Rose” and “The Eclipse of Civilization”.

“LOVE” is an attempt to achieve the confluence of letter and image in an utterly simple manner, one that is universally accessible.

– Alain Arias-Misson