Exhibition Catalog | Isidore Isou

Description

Fleeing Romania in 1945, Isidore Isou arrived in Paris and founded the avant-garde movement: the letterism of which he became the main theoretician. Based on the principle of purification of art and total decomposition of disciplines, its aesthetic intends to rethink all forms of expression and has the will to fight with artistic and ideological conventions.
Deeply utopian, Isidore Isou imagines many concepts; hypergraphy, mechanical aesthetics, super-temporal art, discrepency, kladology, etc. that he applies through his own creations. After poetry, he extends his theoretical system to other disciplines including the visual arts, theater, film, music. etc. before considering disrupting scientific fields. A profusion of works is born from his research: unpronounceable poems made of onomatopoeia, empty frames to fill, kinds of ready-mades, "chiseled" films whose sound is separated from the image ...
The exhibition aims to present a large panel of texts, unpublished archives, drawings. of paintings and his famous film "Treaty of drool and eternity". It is structured around the major notions theorized by Isou.
The catalog gives pride of place to reproductions of his graphic works and archives. He presents three essays and a chrono-biography, as well as numerous works of art.