The exhibition at Bežigrad Gallery 1 continues the tradition of annual exhibitions of traditional, concrete, and visual poetry ever since 2000.
When viewing the poems which combine verbal and visual art it is essential to recognize that they are largely a synthesis of the two. Every letter carries importance: it becomes an independent visual sign and a bearer of meaning. Such work has its predecessors in ancient and Baroque picture poetry and in the optophonetic sound poetry of Futurism.
In this kind of poetry, sound elements and images act as poetic material equal in weight to words themselves. This also applies to the Dadaist textual image, which completely relativizes the usual semantics of language. The letter as a sign thus gains pure visual value: from the coexistence and synthesis of letters, words, figural and abstract images and visual elements, new poetic and meaningful entities are born.
We now find ourselves in the realm of visual poems—where poems are not only read but also viewed as visual artworks.
Miloš Bašin