JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORYBILDPOESI23.03 - 04.06.1975

JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORY

from France exhibits at Galerie S:t Petri, Lund, from 23 May – 4 June 1975.

He is one of the first to have published visual poetry.
Works by various avant-garde poets were gathered in his anthology “Once Again”, published in the USA in 1968.
He has collaborated with numerous magazines over the years, notably in the USA, Japan, and Italy.

Since 1967, Jean-François Bory has published about ten books.
These are created mainly using scissors and glue.
For him, what matters in a book is not the ideas it expresses (which could just as easily be conveyed through speech or painting), but the book itself.
What makes it a book and nothing else is the collaboration between the author, proofreader, typographer, printer, bookbinder, and the finished result that takes shape through Bory’s own work.
He transfers the text into the object, which then begins to live its own typographic life.

Thus, “Letter to My Mother” depicts a sinking warship loaded with the letters of the alphabet.
Letters can also undergo a strange mutation and become inedible mushrooms (“Rotten Poetry”).
“Literature” shows a tank rolling over parts of the alphabet.

Language — as represented through letters, words, sentences, writing, written sheets, and the book — is Jean-François Bory’s working material.
In his visual poetry, he seeks a balance between verbal motifs and visual figures.

Jean-François Bory writes:

“To begin from the beginning is to travel across the black river of writing,
to cross thousands of signs,
high and dark waves of sentences,
and, without remembering,
one day wake up on the other side,
far from everything, far from everything,
for everything is forever beyond time.”

Jean-François Bory has previously exhibited his works in France, Italy, England, Holland, and the USA.
This is the first time he is exhibiting in Scandinavia.

The exhibition is open on weekdays 15:00–20:00,
and on Saturdays and Sundays 12:00–17:00.