Lamberto Pignotti (Florence, 1926).
He moved to Rome in 1968, where he still resides. Already active in the 1950s with his first literary trials in the field of poetry, he created in the early 1960s the first poetic-visual collages related to the concept of technological poetry. The term, which first appeared in an essay in 1962 in the magazine “Questo ed Altro”, refers to the new artistic genre (of which he is a founder) based on the reuse of words associated with images removed from the sphere of mass communications such as periodicals, weeklies, newspapers, etc. in which he alludes to a new artistic genre. The purpose is twofold: one wants to use a language consecrated to social use and, simultaneously, to exorcise its power to make a kind of aesthetic compensation. This research focused on social vocabulary, which would later be called visual poetry, Gruppo 70, founded in Florence in 1963 by Pignotti and Eugenio Miccini, was born. In 1965, he edited the movement’s first anthology, “Poesie Visive”, published in 4 volumes by Sampietro of Bologna. Between ’66 and ’68, in search of the fundamental elements of popular culture, the Stamps series was born. During the following 1970s, his experiments have as protagonists images taken from newspapers to induce the viewer to focus on the photograph regardless of the occasion that produced it, as happens in the series of De-compositions. Since the 1980s, his focus has been on the female figure. Pignotti intervenes with her writing on images of winking young women. Pignotti’s experiments result in: “Poems and no-poems”, the “Cine-Poems”, logo-musical tapes, plastic object books, poems to touch, “Chewing Poems”, “Drink-Poems”, and, of course, “Visual Poems” in the form of collage or intervention on news, fashion, and advertising photos.
