Lamberto Pignotti

Lamberto Pignotti, was born in Florence in 1926. Italian poet and writer, also active in the field of art and visual poetry. In the early 1960s he was one of the first to deal with the intersections between poetry, speech and mass media, laying the theoretical foundations and assimilating the lessons of the avant-garde on the one hand and that of Pop Art on the other. Lamberto Pignotti, together with Eugenio Miccini, is considered one of the fathers of Italian visual poetry. Active for many years as an artist, theorist, curator of exhibitions, militant critic since the mid-1950s. He has collaborated with national and international magazines and newspapers, in RAI programs. He was a university professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence and at the DAMS in Bologna, holding courses on artistic and literary avant-gardes, mass media and new media. A supporter of synaesthesia in the arts, he will create poetic performances and events in which he will mix verbal and gestural linguistic signs that will involve the five senses. In this way we will have performative actions with poetry to eat, to drink, to listen to, to smell, to put into action with gesture and voice. His visual poems are presented in the form of a collage that reworks or intervenes with writing on images and photographs taken from the world of mass media to highlight the contradictions in a procedure that assimilates that of Pop Art. Lamberto Pignotti has created object books with various materials , performance using fragments of variously combined texts, even with the intervention of the public. His work has been presented all over the world and is included in educational texts, such as the History of Italian Art by Electa-Bruno Mondadori. The major Italian critics have dealt with Pignotti, such as Gillo Dorfles, Giulio Carlo Argan, Umberto Eco, Achille Bonito Oliva. In the 90s he approached the online art circuit, participating with him in various Internet events and performances in the context of new media reviews.