"Les cages du désir" & poèmes visuels
Vernissage jeudi 15 octobre à partir de 18h
Public Poem "La dernière S(C)ène" à 19h devant la galerie
Du 16 octobre au 21 novembre 2009 "The Cages of Desire" & visual poems
Opening Thursday October 15, starting at 6pm
Public Poem "La dernière S(C)ène" at 7pm in front of the gallery
October 16 - November 21, 2009
© Alain Arias-Misson, "Le festin des amoureux", 2008, 26 x 26 x 14 cm, matières végétales du Panama, plexiglas, meubles miniatures, lettrages.
The beauty and the wildness of the tropical vegetation about the cages, and the conceptual purity of the transparent figures through which the lapidary texts are read, illustrate our permanent oscillation between the incandescence of the sex drive and a pure logic in which erotic relations may be reduced to a simple algebraic equation.
As background, the gallery will also present a selection of the artist's earlier visual poems, the oldest of which date from the 1960's, and which the "Cages" ultimately derive from.
Biographical background:
Born in 1936 in Brussels, Belgium.
Educated in the United States.
Lives and works in Paris and Venice.
One of the innovators of visual poetry at the beginning of the 1960’s and close to the Fluxus movement, he has expressed his ideas indifferently in object-poems, theatre-boxes and books.
In 1965, he invented the concept of the Public Poem, a "magical" theatre of the street which consists in the appropriation of the city-space by the poem. Always provocative and poli-tical, it exists in a destabilizing relation which it sets up between the public and the text.His visual work is an instantanaeous micro-theatre in which words, objects and tiny characters crystallize a narrative in constant fluctuation. In this "object" theatre which he characterizes as shamanic, words and objects "act upon" the artist/observer. It is this psychic function of "memory forwards" which constitutes the hidden dimension of the work; this miniature theatre postulates a fundamental ambiguity between "making-believe" and magical efficacy.
Publications: two artists books on his public poems: in 1978, "The Public Poem Book"; in 1993, "The Verbo-Visual Sins of a Literary Saint", which is a visio-poetic composition of soft-porn female silhouettes merged with photographs of public poems.
Four novels: in 1975, "The Confessions of a madman, murderer, rapist, bomber, thief or A Day from the Journal of an Ordinary American", in which he uses photos and clippings from newspapers in order to divert these into an entirely new narrative; in 1993, "The Mind Crime of August Saint", in which a fiction is built out of multiple visual media without reproducing any of these, a concept he names "superfiction" which was taken up in American critical discourse; in 2007, "Theatre of Incest", in which he investigates the roots of our sexual fantasies; and in 2010, "Tintin meets the Dragon Queen in the Return of the Maya to Manhattan, 2012".
"The Visitor", 2009, a monographic work on the whole of his visual work has just been published by INAC/Ulisse e Calypso, ed. mediteranee in which the artist revisits four decades of mental theatres and street theatres.
Galerie Lara Da Vincy
47 rue de Seine - 75006 Paris - France
tel. +33 (0)1 43 26 72 51
fax +33 (0)1 40 51 78 88
http://www.lara-vincy.com