Colchester’s Firstsite gallery exhibits the work of late French avant-garde poet Henri Chopin, whose interest in chaos and form stretched from sound art to graphic concrete poems made using a typewriter.
You’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of Henri Chopin. Despite his huge output as a poet, painter, graphic artist and designer, typographer, independent publisher, filmmaker, broadcaster and arts promoter, this little-known but important figure of the French and British Concrete Poetry and Lettrist movements has remained largely unsung – something a new exhibition at Colchester’s Firstsite gallery aims to change.
A major pioneer of sound and visual poetry, Chopin’s wartime experiences had a huge affect on his later career. He escaped from a Czech forced labour camp, only to be recaptured by Nazi forces and sent with concentration camp detainees on a ‘death march’ west, a harrowing experience that made him acutely aware of the aural range of the human voice and body, and fostered a life-long preoccupation with chaos and the space between order and disorder.
In the 1950s, Chopin began experimenting with making abstract audio collages from recordings of his own body, including the vibrations of his nasal hair and even the sound of him swallowing a microphone, and recorded more than 100 audio poems and sound art pieces during his lifetime. Residing in Essex between 1968 and 1985, he put on a small arts festival at his home in Ingatestone, inviting the likes of William Burroughs and Brio Gysin to perform.
Chopin was also a prolific visual artist, using a typewriter to create colourful and geometric concrete poems known as dactylopoèmes. It’s the latter that Firstsite has chosen to focus on, collecting together a range of works on paper, publications, prints and other ephemera produced while Chopin was living in Essex. A must-see show of the work of a true pioneer. Henri Chopin dans l’Essex
Firstsite, Colchester
Saturday 22 March to Sunday 1 June 2014