Paul De Vree
(c)image: M HKA
*VISUEEL* was published in 1981 by De Zwarte Panter, a gallery in Antwerp. The bibliophile folder contains nine silk-screen prints made after original poems composed by De Vree in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which appear in the collections *Zimprovisaties* and *Poëzien*, where the poems are only printed in black and white. For this edition the poems were enlarged and coloured. Roger Vandaele made the silk-screen prints. The small selection of poems collected in *VISUEEL* is a good illustration of the various aspects of De Vree’s visual poems, in terms of both form and content. In the imaging of words, De Vree here puts the emphasis on the development of the figurative element. The visual quality of this poetry is meant to generate associations and an aesthetic appreciation in the viewer. The figurative aspect generally takes the form of a pictogram: a figure is constructed with letters either typographically (by means of the typewriter) or graphically (by means of non-linguistic elements like lines and blocks of black), where figure and text converge semantically and semiotically, through contrast and tautology. The text thus takes on the recognisable shape of a sword in *My word is my sword*, of piano keys in *Jazz*, of butterflies in *Ik vlinder*. A stylised female torso is suggested in *Eeroo-tic*: the words ‘eerootic’ and ‘tic’ trace the erogenous zones, including the mouth, breasts, navel and mons Veneris. Like the concrete poetry, these poems initially appear to be merely aesthetic, and yet they are more than that when one considers their strongly committed character. *Tsjechoslowakije* is an ode to Jan Palach and his protest by self-immolation against the Russian invasion during the Prague Spring. In *Het leven is een baccarat*, De Vree presents life as a game of chance or a rat cage and hereby voices his reservations about the social order. Besides these condemnations of violence and injustice, other poems thematise sexuality and eroticism, such as *Une autre histoire d’O* (a reference to Pauline Réage’s erotic novel), *Eeroo-tic*, *Ik vlinder*, and *Rose*, which is in fact also an anagram of Eros, one of the two main themes in De Vree’s oeuvre.
