Micro e Macro Expressão Tipográfica na Obra de Augusto de Campos

Abstract

Augusto de Campos is one of the main promotores of concretism, specially in Latin America. The attribution of the Janus Pannonius Award (2017) after being awarded with the Brazilian Order of Cultural Merit (2015) and receiving the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Award (2015) reinforced the recognition of his importance and his poetry through literary world. Text in Concrete Poetry is thought in function of an intensive exploration of the potential expression of each word allowing combined ways of reading without any given order, which will allow multiple ways within the textual surface. The page is a container of ideas and sensations which are expressed from a typographic partiture, exploring rhythmically the weight, the size and the hierarchy and spacing of typography on page, which relates with the inflection, stress and rhythm applied during oral reading (Meggs & Purvis, 2012, p. 261). Current literary reading protocols are broken, making the reading process interactive (Fajardo, 2009, pp. 78-79) while enabling a plurality of aesthetic meanings and effects upon reception of the literary text which is situated at different levels on the same page (Reis, 2013, pp. 19-20). This level of proximity of the reader to the text brings him microtextually closer to the typography, trying to understand the specificity of each typographic element, while trying to meet a macrotextual message by the visual aspect of the text. The appreciation and enjoyment of a text ceases to be purely literary to also cover the assessment of the artistic point of view, aesthetic, social and cultural (Aguilar, 2005, pp. 76-77). In the same way, it allows the transposition and presence of literature beyond its traditional contexts into the fields of other arts, such as galleries and museums. Augusto de Campos' work is characterised by its strong symbolic load, in which the semantic value, syntactic and typographical enhance the value of each and amplify the "overall value" of the text (Portela, 2003, p. 5). In this article it is intended to make an overview of the main Augusto’s poetry fields considering the text and its visual shape and as the printing interferes with reading and activates the various layers of verbivocovisual significance (Portela, 2003, p. 3) as well as the analysis of cultural references and symbolic values associated with specific types and designs of the letters used, as well as production and reproduction technologies.