Augusto de Campos: pós poemas

05.02 - 07.03.26

Augusto de Campos

pós poemas

Portuguese

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.”

Esquecer (2017) and Vertade (2021) call for a highly attentive nonlinear reading that is perceptual, almost physical. In Vertade, Augusto de Campos tricks the gaze by swapping the letters D and T in the antonyms verdade [truth] and mentira [lie], creating a semantic short-circuit that jolts the viewer’s trust in conventional reading. In Esquecer [meaning to forget] the artist enacts the progressive loss of words from a preexisting poem, retrieved and placed over the surface of a cloudy sky. As the words pass through the clouds, they fade and merge with the image, producing an effect of visual erasure that becomes a sensitive reflection on memory, forgetting, and time. Time, in turn, is also a central reference in the exhibition’s title, pós poemas, in which the term “pós” bears a semantic duality: it conveys both the meaning of “after” and the plural of “pó” [dust] – the material vestige of what once was.

Artist CV

Augusto de Campos is one of the key figures of concrete poetry in Brazil, as well as an essayist, translator and literary and musical critic. His artistic creation is pervaded by experimentation with language, through the idea of unity among the various communicational resources, such as words, sound and image. His visual poems and poem-objects marked the 1960s and 1970s, definitively positioning him in the artistic vanguard in Brazil. From 1990 onward, he intensified his experiments with the new media, presenting his poems in different communication channels, such as electronic billboards, video text, neon signs, holograms, lasers, computer graphics, and in multimedia events, with which he has worked until today.

Active since the late 1940s, in 1952 he launched the literary magazine Noigandres, together with his brother Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, introducing the international movement of concrete poetry in Brazil. In 1956, he participated in the Primeira Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta no Brasil, at the Museu de Arte Moderna of São Paulo. His most emblematic projects, which have been studied until today, include Viva Vaia (1949/1979) and the poem-objects in partnership with artist Julio Plaza, Poemóbiles (1974) and Caixa Preta (1975). Also in 1975, he produced Pulsar, a poem that is part of the series Stelegramas (1975–78), considered the artist’s first “poema constelação” [constellation poem] and one of his best examples of poetic construction. His poems have been gathered in more than 15 volumes, including: Despoesia (1993), Não (2003), Outro (2015) and more recently, Pós Poemas (2025). As a translator, he has worked with the writings of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Maiakovski, Marina Tsvetaeva, Arnaut Daniel, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud and others. Augusto de Campos was recently conferred the international prizes Prêmio Ibero-Americano de Poesia Pablo Neruda, 2015, and the Grande Prêmio de Poesia Janus Pannonius, 2017.