During Art’s Birthday, Alain Arias-Misson's new show opened in the Inbox on the fourth floor of M HKA. The inventor of the public poem himself calls his recently created works 'meta-concretism', in which the material presence of letters plays a central role.

In 2022, Coppejans Gallery and the M HKA jointly organised a public poem with the artist on the occasion of 100 years of Paul Van Ostaijen's 'occupied city'. A video of this action is also played at the museum.

In September, Arias-Misson's work will again be shown in the gallery.

Alain Arias-Misson about the expo:

I call my new two-dimensional work 'meta-concretism' to distinguish it from 'concrete poetry' and 'visual poetry'. For many years I made concrete and then visual poetry - in the latter a dialectic emerges between printed or handwritten words and fragmentary images. This has become very common today, dozens of magazines and books and galleries use it. In my opinion, this trend has become a 'potpourri', a reservoir into which everything is dumped. Painters, poets, graphic artists, cartoonists, advertisers mix text and image and now they do it mostly with digital media and this poetic form has lost its 'sharpness', its identity. It has become dull.

The beauty of concrete poetry and early visual poetry, such as that of Apollinaire and Laurence Sterne, rests in the fact that they arose from an authentic poetic intuition. Only poets made that. Therefore, I have returned to the accuracy of concrete poetry - with particular emphasis on the material presence of letters and possibly words, and techniques of combination and permutation of letters - which takes shape through the action of the subordinate image. For me, this results in: meta-concretism. I recently made several series starting from that idea - "The Concrete Rose" and "The Eclipse of Civilisation".

"LOVE" is an attempt to merge letter and image in an extremely simple, universally accessible way.