Focus artiste : Isidore Isou

Born in 1925 in Botosani (Romania) and died in 2007 in Paris (France), Isidore Isou was a theorist and artist whose influence was crucial, particularly on Situationism.
Eager to shake up the established order and move beyond surrealism, in 1946 he founded the Lettrist movement, which set out to annihilate the word by dilating the letter. Isou was equally at home with poetry and mathematics, cinema, music and painting.
In 1953, he presented his oil paintings composed of words, numbers, letters and images in his first exhibition, entitled Les Nombres (l’art métagraphique).
In 1962, the canvas work Dépassement lettriste (impressionniste) de la dimension de Van Gogh laid the groundwork for his series of “hypergraphic” paintings by combining a reproduction of a Van Gogh self-portrait with a handwritten text: “The very fact that Van Gogh was obliged to write letters to his brother to explain himself proves that his painting was not enough for him, and that he was tending towards the surpassing of his fragmentary art for a more complete art, beyond painting and writing.” More than twenty years later, Isou began the Commentaries on Van Gogh series (1985); each work is organized around a reproduction of a painting by the Dutch painter, framed on the left and right by a supra-language typical of Lettrist painting (graphic signs, symbols) and, at the top and bottom, a handwritten text by Isou commenting on his work as a copyist.