Visiting Artist - Augusto de Campos | O Pulsar
Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to present O Pulsar, the first exhibition devoted to the work of Augusto de Campos (São Paulo, 1931) in its space. The show opens on Saturday the 1st of July and brings a representative selection of the poet’s artistic ‘verbivocovisual’ practice, covering a time span from 1974 to 1985 with the curatorship by Daniel Rangel.
Augusto de Campos is one of the pioneers of Brazilian concrete poetry – alongside with Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos –, and presents for the first time in an art gallery a selection of his artistic production.
The time span that the exhibition focuses on reveals a body of work marked by the transition of analogical medium to digital. The poems are presented in the form of posters that employ the letraset adhesive letters in addition to videos and screen prints, thus evidencing through the multiple solutions and adopted medias, the way in which the poet-artist explores the technological development of those years.
As the exhibition’s title suggests, the show gravitates around the 1975’s namesake poem “Pulsar”, from the Stelegramas’ series, considered to be the first of Augusto de Campos’ ‘constellational poems’. The exhibition displays for the first time to audiences two poster versions of that poem. Although they both date from 1975, the version presented with futura letraset types is earlier than the version which employs the so-called baby-teeth typography where Augusto de Campos finally obtained the iconical result desired.
Other ‘stellar poems’ from that same period are presented, namely, “S.O.S”, “Todos os sons”(1983) and “Inestante”(1983), in the form of posters with letraset adhesive letters – they also have never been exhibited before. The video also appears as support for Augusto de Campos’poetry, in revised versions of the poem “O Pulsar” musically interpreted by Caetano Veloso in 1975 and video edited in 1984, “S.O.S” and “Tudo está dito” both set to music by Cid Campos in 1992 and which first digital animations are conceived, respectively in 2003 and 2012. Also the poem “Quasar” from 1975 will be showcased in the gallery’s main hall in its silkscreen version, produced in 1991 in Italy.
The exhibition is tuned with Brazilian concrete poets’ ideals of poetry. Concrete poetry approaches words as things, not simply as linguistic signs. Under that approach, words could be considered as colours and sounds leading the poem to profit these qualities in addition to its semantic dimensions. The result is a systemic quality that turns poetry into fine art and the poet into its artist.
Augusto de Campos’ show inaugurates the recently-conceived project called Artista Visitante, which aims to cultivate an even more dynamic programme by inviting artists that are not part of the gallery’s original casting to develop proposals that run parallel to its formal exhibitions calendar.
About Augusto de Campos
Augusto de Campos was born in 1931 in São Paulo. Poet, translator, literary critic, musical critic and essayist, along with Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos is considered one of the exponents of Brazilian concrete poetry. He graduated in law from the Faculty of Largo de São Francisco. He published his first poems in 1949, in the Brazilian Magazine of Poetry. He publishes his debut book, The Lesser King of the Kingdom, in 1951. He participates in the creation of the Noigandres group and publishes a magazine with the same name along with Haroldo de Campos (1929 - 2003) and Décio Pignatari (1927-2012). In 1956, he participated in the 1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art, in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM / SP). In 1959, he participated in an international exhibition of concrete poetry in Stuttgart, Germany, and the following the exhibition travelled to Tokyo, Japan. In 1963, he presented at the National Poetry Week of Vanguard in Belo Horizonte and the following year Exposes the series of poems-posters Popcretos. In the 1960s, with the collaboration of poets like Cassiano Ricardo (1895 - 1974), Sebastião Uchoa Leite (1935 - 2003) and Paulo Leminski (1944 - 1989), he edited the literary magazine Invenção. In 1974, he published Caixa Preta, a set of visual poems and manipulative poems, developed in partnership with the plastic artist Júlio Plaza (1938-2003). In 2016 he presented the retrospective REVER at SESC Pompeia that gathers his poetic work.
About the curator Daniel Rangel
Daniel Rangel is an artist, curator, producer and cultural manager. He was Director of Museums of the State Secretariat of Culture of Bahia, from 2008 to 2011 and assistant director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, between 2007 and 2008. He idealized and directed the space SOSO + Cultura, in São Paulo. He was one of the curators of the 17th Biennial of Cerveira (Portugal), the Second Triennial of Luanda (Angola), the 6th Biennial of São Tomé e Príncipe and the 8th International Biennial of Curitiba, held in October 2015. As curator, also, he idealized and curated the Fourth Dimension programme, where he presented works by Tunga, José Resende and Waltercio Caldas in dialogue with Augustin Rodin's work at the Palacete das Artes in Salvador (2009) as well as the programmme Ocupas (2009/2010) Specific of Eder Santos, Carlito Carvalhosa, José Rufino and Caetano Dias, in dialogue with the surroundings of the Palace of the Acclamation. He also performed the show "Transit" that circulated in Salvador, Brasília and São Paulo with works by contemporary African artists among other dozens of collective and individual in Brazil and abroad including Arnaldo Antunes, Rodrigo Braga and Chelpa Ferro. In 2016 he is curator of the show REVER at Sesc Pompeia, retrospective of the poetic work of Augusto de Campos.
