«Moi, je reste, en 1960, fiérement surréaliste». E.L.T. Mesens: From Dada-Surrealist Research to Verbovisual Experimentation in the 1960s

Abstract

After initially forging links with the Dada movement, from 1926 Edouard Léon Théodore Mesens (Brussels, 1903-1971) became an active member of Belgian Surrealism. He was one of the most polyhedral figures of Belgian cultural scene: during his long career he was an artist, collagist, musician, poet and writer, as well as gallery owner, collector and art dealer, constantly involved in the sales and purchases of modern art, in particular Dadaist and Surrealist artworks. Since the beginning, in the 1920s, he used the collage as a medium to subverted the visual representation and develop a new epistemological artistic object, undermining the canonical dialogue between text and image. This methodological approach remained the major trat of his post-war artworks as well, when after a period of inactivity, on the occasion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, he decided to create new collages, finding in Italy a fertile receptive context for his experimentations. Starting from the analysis of unpublished archival materials, as well as visual sources, the article aims to analyze Mesens’ artistic approach to collage and shed new light on his post-war production, characterized by new linguistic and semantic experimentations.