An outstanding writer, described by Gilles Deleuze as “the greatest poet in the French language”, Ghérasim Luca is the “héros-limite” of inventiveness in language and imagery, an inspired “cubomaniac” who traverses and tests the practices of poetry, photography, drawing, collage and art publishing.
Image: Ghérasim Luca - “Héros-Limite”
An outstanding writer, described by Gilles Deleuze as “the greatest poet in the French language”, Ghérasim Luca is the “héros-limite” of inventiveness in language and imagery, an inspired “cubomaniac” who traverses and tests the practices of poetry, photography, drawing, collage and art publishing, and the inventor of “ontophonia” as a new system of poetic language that can be expressed phonetically and visually. After the Second World War, Luca, an explorer of the “non-Oedipal” aspects of philosophy, intensified the surreal dimension of art and life via disturbing works of collage, montage, diversion and black humour – all surrealist processes that evoke both wonder and concern.
Ghérasim Luca - “Héros-Limite”
Based on the exceptional donation by Micheline Catti-Ghérasim Luca to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the exhibition revisits his hugely diverse poetic and visual studies, from his membership of the Romanian surrealists to his fruitful collaborations with artists and writers (Wifredo Lam, Piotr Kowalski, Claude Tarnaud) and the world of publishing (Le Soleil Noir, Claude Givaudan), and to sound-poetry recitals, which left an indelible mark on the French and international experimental poetry scenes during the 1960s and 70s. The exhibition also features a related documentary selection from the collection of the Kandinsky Library.
Ghérasim Luca - “Héros-Limite”
There is a special focus on the “performative” aspect of Ghérasim Luca’s poetry (the recitations of his “poetic stutterings”) in the form of an audiovisual environment created in the exhibition space itself.
Ghérasim Luca - “Héros-Limite”
“We agree with delirious inventions, tears, somnambulism, the real functioning of thought, the elixir of long life, the transformation of quantity into quality, the concrete, the absurd, the negation of negation, desire, hysteria, furs, black magic, the delirium of interpretation, the dialectics of the dialectic, the fourth dimension, the simulacrum, flames, vice, objective chance, manias, mystery, black humour, cryptaesthesia, scientific materialism and bloodstains.” (Ghérasim Luca, D. Trost)Présentation de graphies colorées, de cubomanie et d’objets, 7–28 January 1945, Bucharest, Sala Brezoianu.
Until 7 January 2019