Received this beautiful bookin exchange for Plágium2000‘s Fanzine Show Catalog. The book was published in 2011. The following lines taken from Visualizing Poetics blog describe his collage works.
Luc Fierens ended last year with a short but significant exhibition of his works entitled “Sulla Strada [On the Road]—Luc Fierens” at the U Man /Contemporary /Art /Space /Project in Marano d’Isera, Trento, Italy. This exhibition covered Luc’s career as a visual poet and collagist from 1984 through last year, and the catalog of the exhibition presents these in chronological order, which allows us to see how Luc’s style progress from a fairly rough-hewn one to a style almost as polished as the glossy advertisements that became the main source of fodder for his poems.
Luc is an artist for the world, so his works are “written” in English, French, Flemish, Italian, German, and even wordless. And certainly combinations of the above. His poetry is the poetry of appropriation and anti-approbation. Often his poems focus on the the subjugation of the populace through the power of commercialism. This is most evident with his works using the feminine form, sometimes sexualized, to show the contemporary woman’s fate, in the hands of commerce, to be objectified, sexualized, starved, controlled, and made mute. Often in one of Luc’s collages, a woman’s mouth is covered or removed. She may be spoken to, but she cannot speak.
So his poetry is often political, but it is also humorous, as in a table of four gentlemen discuss the meaning of art, the making of art, the meaning of language, the way a dreamer dreams himself into being and scratches out the words to make any of the sense they need.
His poems are about the human mystery of our times, where we are filled with hope and abundance and despair, and terror at the possibilities we have devised. And ours was, if I’m reading the second poem above correct as being in Spanish, an expensive era, one that cost us dearly, because if Mammon didn’t get you then all manner of believers would. For the believers are the most dangerous of us all.
Luc is a poet. He may hide himself as an artist, but that is only the shape he takes to make these poems, and I think they are important because they are about the process of living and making sense in a world increasingly complex and increasingly focused on money. And I think they are important because he has that collagist’s eye that allows him to take disparate images and words and patch them together into a whole world, one both dazzlingly beautiful and horrific, and at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place.
