Domenico Cerroni Cadoresi (1924-2007): Concrete Poetry

Artist
Domenico Cerroni Cadoresi (1924–2007)
 
Title
Concrete Poetry
 
Medium
Offset print
 
Material
Cardboard
 
Dimensions
20 x 14.5 cm
 
Editor
Edition Panderma, Basel
 
Year
1966, published 1977
 
Signature
Signed in pencil
 
Provenance
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private Collection, Basel
 
Condition / Restauration
Mint archival condition
 
Biography
Domenico Cerroni Cadoresi (1924–2007) was an Italian writer, essayist, art critic and painter active in the circles of European concrete and visual poetry. Working largely from the Friuli region in north-eastern Italy, he combined a career as a prolific cultural critic — contributing art and exhibition reviews to publications such as Il Friuli — with his own experimental practice in word and image.
 
In the early 1960s Cerroni Cadoresi was in dialogue with the protagonists of Italian kinetic and programmed art, corresponding with the celebrated Gruppo N in Padua, and he became a recognised voice within the international networks of concrete poetry, mail art and the neo-avant-garde that linked Italy to the wider European scene. His work belongs to the moment when poetry abandoned the linear line in favour of the visual field, treating letters, words and typographic signs as plastic, constructive material.
 
This offset print, Concrete Poetry, exemplifies that pursuit: language reduced to pure visual structure, in keeping with the constructive spirit of the 1960s. Issued by Carl Laszlo's renowned Edition Panderma in Basel, it is a signed sheet from one of the discreet but persistent figures of the European concrete-poetry movement.