Minuit (Midnight)

The time Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro spent in Paris, in 1916, brought him into contact with the avant-garde movements of the time and, with their influence, he began to create a new current of experimental poetry called creacionismo, or Creationism. In 1918, he moved to Madrid temporarily and became part of the recently formed Ultraist group of Rafael Cansinos Assens and Guillermo de Torre, participating in their gatherings at café Colonial and those arranged by Ramón Gómez de la Serna at café Pombo. In the years that followed, he moved between Paris and Madrid, where he published experimental poetry books and articles in avant-garde magazines.

Formal experimentation was a key characteristic of Ultraism, which made use of resources from the calligram, for instance the play with the typographic and spatial arrangement of the text and the choice of words based on atypical phonic and semantic relationships. These works are three of the originals for his editorial project Salle XIV, which was designed to consist of thirteen compositions made via the pochoir technique. They were displayed for a brief time in 1922 at Galerie G. L. Manuel Frères in Paris, although the project would eventually be cancelled. Straddling calligram and pictogram, they were considered more as painted poems, in which poetry is conceived as an aesthetic object beyond the traditional book support, and a further step beyond in Ultraist poetry. The poems, intended to be seen and read, can also be viewed as precedents of the literary posters Ernesto Giménez Caballero would produce a few years later.



Raúl Martínez Arranz