Raymond Roussel's poetry and his influence on art

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto, Spain), opens tomorrow Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain).

This is the first major exhibition to be held on the figure of the poet, novelist and dramatist Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1877-Palermo, 1933) and his artistic and literary influence on contemporary art. The title of the show refers to what are perhaps his two best-known novels, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa.

Classed as a "difficult author" by Robert de Montesquiou, a French poet with links to the symbolist movement, Roussel left an oeuvre of poems, novels and plays without precedent in the history of literature in terms of their creative universe, abounding in spectacles, masks and phantasmagorias, and their clear and descriptive writing.

He belonged to an haute bourgeoisie nostalgic for the grandeur of the past, and he kept his distance from the avant-gardes all his life "like a man fully determined to follow no inclination other than that of his spirit", as André Breton said of him. Nevertheless, it was this group of admirers that he eventually approached in order to put his work in circulation.

The exhibition shows how Roussel's aesthetic-literary undertakings, so complex and ambitious and with their strange blend of conceptual rigor and linguistic delirium, have been a source of inspiration to visual artists such as Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Allen Ruppersberg, Rodney Graham… And also to authors from other fields, from philosophy, to literature, music and even ethnographic research. The work of Roussel can thus be used as a point of departure for an oblique and transversal reading of 20th century art.

Date: until July 1.
Location: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Rua Dom João de Castro, 210, 4150-417 Porto, Portugal.
Opening hours: from Tuesday to Saturday, from 10am to 12 midnight. Sunday and Monday, from 10am to 8pm.