Interview with Augusto de Campos and Luciana Brito for the newspaper Metrópolis on TV Cultura.
As he approaches his 95th birthday, Augusto de Campos has recently published the book pós poemas, which presents a body of work understood as a landmark synthesis of the evolution of his poetic research. Produced over the past two decades, the works in the volume have given rise to a selection now transposed into the gallery’s Modernist Room, proposing an experience that is not only visual but also spatial, in dialogue with the environment designed by Rino Levi. In the exhibition setting, the poems cease to function solely as objects of reading and assert themselves as visual and spatial experiences: letters become images, colors take on semantic roles, and the graphic arrangement establishes rhythms and tensions that draw the viewer into active perceptual engagement. Augusto de Campos’s poetry is not organized around the linear progression of the verse, but rather through visual and sonic fields of force that challenge conventional reading. Resulting from a process the poet began in the 1950s, these works present a verbivocovisual structure characteristic of Concrete poetry – in which word, sound, color, and form are intrinsically interconnected. Nevertheless, their composition relies on 21st-century graphic and digital
resources. Beyond the broad technological possibilities offered by computer graphics – which the
artist has been using since the early 1990s – Augusto de Campos also experiments with elements
drawn from his immediate context, including ideogrammatic structures and mathematical logic,
intertextual procedures that reference Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Fernando Pessoa,
and strategies associated with the concept of the “ready-made.”
