Exhibition "post poems", by Augusto de Campos

About to turn 95, Augusto de Campos recently published the book “post poems"(2025), which brings together a collection of works, understood as a landmark synthesis of the evolution of his poetic research. Produced over the last two decades, the works gathered in the volume gave rise to a selection transposed to the space of the Modernist Room of the gallery, proposing an experience that is not only visual, but also spatial, in dialogue with the environment designed by Rino Levi. In the context of the exhibition, the poems cease to be merely objects of reading and assert themselves as visual and spatial experiences: letters become images, colors assume a semantic function, and the graphic arrangement establishes rhythms and tensions that demand an active perception from the public."

Augusto de Campos's poems are not organized by the linearity of verse, but by visual and sound fields of force that challenge conventional reading. Resulting from a process initiated by the poet in the 1950s, these works present a verbivocovisual structure, characteristic of Concretism, in which word, sound, color, and form are articulated in an inseparable way. At the same time, they incorporate graphic and digital resources typical of the 21st century. Beyond the broad technological field offered by computer graphics, used by the artist since the early 1990s, Augusto de Campos also experiments with specific elements of his context, with ideograms and mathematical logic, as well as intertextual procedures that dialogue with references such as Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Fernando Pessoa, among others, and with strategies associated with the concept of "ready-made".

In the works Forget (2017) and Truth (2021), reading ceases to be linear and becomes also perceptive, almost physical, requiring attentive monitoring from the reader. In TruthAugusto de Campos deceives the eye by switching the letters D and T in antonymous words. truth e mentira, creating a semantic short circuit that undermines trust in reading. Already in ForgetThe artist promotes the progressive loss of words from a pre-existing poem, rescued and inserted onto the surface of a cloudy sky. As they pass through the clouds, the words fade and merge with the image, provoking a visual erasure effect that becomes a sensitive reflection on memory, forgetting, and time. The latter, incidentally, is also a central reference in the exhibition's title, "post-poems," where the term "post" carries a semantic duality: it indicates both the after how much is the plural of dust, residual matter of what once was.

Service
Exhibition | post poems
From February 5th to March 7nd
Monday, 10 AM to 18 PM; Tuesday to Friday, 10 AM to 19 PM; Saturday, 11 AM to 17 PM.