VISUAL POETRY Relations between image and word grow more complex, more articulated, less exclusive. Sometimes a word is absent, but substituted, changed into a metaphor, by a mental discourse which precedes through images. Sometimes it only shows the movement of a situation, a time, a development, a psychological condition. Other materials, other signs, other languages estranged from their context intervene. The primary image-word relationship opens to other and different logo-iconic combinations. Consequently there is a production of works very different in style among themselves, even within the production of a single operator. It is precisely this plurality of styles which makes Visual Poetry a new and peculiar a-stylistic unity. The constant relation with mass-media, the expropriation practice and the transgression from that system of the arts which founded its criteria of merit and hierarchy on style, represent the linguistic autonomy of Visual Poetry, and make it a new medium of artistic production, which cannot otherwise be. identified but with new critical instruments and new historical methodologies. Then the opinion of most critics according to which Visual Poetry is a hybrid and j or intermediate phenomenon, is to be considered at least hasty. It does not hold up on analysis; it tends to be reductive; it may be used for ambiguous, extemporaneous cultural operations and for a-critical forces. Like for instance including Visual Poetry in the recent (and ill-defined) trend of ecriture, or, vice versa, rendering ecriture a convenient label under which different artistic experiences may be gathered as part of a single phenomenon, deferring any distinction, that in some cases cannot be but historical, besides being critical. The identification of Visual Poetry with ecriture is impracticable, as the image-word relationship is completely different, and contrary. While in ecriture (we accept the singleness of the term only as other than Visual Poetry) word relieves institutional aesthetic image in its present expressive and communicational impoverishment (and no matter whether the word underlines, or integrates, or runs parallel), in Visual Poetry the image relieves and/or gives the word a new meaning. Here, on the contrary, different variants and combinations and relations are very important to the understanding of the plurality of styles we spoke of above. Then it seems evident that we cannot ascribe to Visual Poetry, as has been and is done, a history which considers the word a literary and poetic matrix, whose limits (and the ambiguity of ecriture) Visual Poetry denounces in a society which for times, spaces, and anthropological changes is a society of images, as it has been called. Out of all this a more than reasonable doubt arises concerning all the ancestors and precedents variously attributed to Visual Poetry: from Futurism to Cubism, from Marinetti to Schwitters, from Mallarme to Apollinaire, from Alexandrine poetry to the illuminated codex, etc. Genetic ties which are no doubt prestigious and reassuring, and that is also difficult to give up. Yet at this point it would be rash, from a critical point of view, not to compare them with the aesthetic model of mass-media, to legitimate historically (if there is a legitimation, as it seems) the determining role the mass-media acted in the formation of Visual Poetry. This is a very useful comparison also in checking whether those precedents are more proper to Concrete Poetry (as it partly claims) with which Visual Poetry is still confused, or considered an «antagonistic» form of poetry. To exhibit them together, or to insert them together in anthologies, as usually happens, more than a critical «absence of mind» is one of the many kinds of disorder it is necessary to overcome in order to clarify the al-ready rather confused panorama of the latest artistic experiences, to which Visual Poetry belongs only because of its contemporaneity, and not because of the time it originated Luciano Ori, Firenze 1979 Here you can find some of these art works for sale	SUMMER Acrylic and pencil on masonite Width: cm.60 Height: cm.70 Dated: 1991	VIRGINIA Acrylic and pencil on canvas Width: cm.60 Height: cm.70 Dated: 1987	ITALIENISCHE MALEREI Medium: Acrylic on masonite Width: cm.60 Height: cm.80 Dated: 1989
	DISTANCE OF THE "IO" Medium: Acrylic on canvas Width: cm.50 Height: cm.50 Dated: 1985	GONG Medium: Acrylic on canvas Width: cm.80 Height: cm.80 Dated: 1989	RACECOURSE Acrylic, pencil and collage on masonite Width: cm.60 Height: cm.70 Dated: 1991
	ROMEO ALFA Acrylic and collage on canvas Width: cm.50 Height: cm.70 Dated: 1990	OTTO Medium: Acrylic on masonite Width: cm.90 Height: cm.110 Dated: 1989	THE NAME OF SARA Medium: Acrylic on canvas Width: cm.40 Height: cm.30 Dated: 1986