John GIORNO

John Giorno was born in 1935 in New York. He died there in 2019.

John Giorno assigns to the function of poet everything that is divine, sacred and pragmatic. It embraces two disciplines, poetry and art, which have been contemplated for centuries. His Poem Paintings, with their strong vibrational intensity, are segments taken from his poems, phrases that have always haunted him, ‘Thanks 4 Nothing’, ‘Don’t wait for anything’, ‘I resigned myself to being here’. The canvases of this New York figure move easily from punchy black and white to rainbow-colored watercolors and from large format to intimate square. The only word having the right to quote in his works. After freeing poetry from its chains since its beginnings, thanks to the Giorno Poetry System, and to projects like Dial A Poem, allowing the public to have access to poetry readings with a simple phone call, he continues to stretching the limits of his art to the breaking point. It is practically impossible to talk about Giorno's work without talking about his encounters, the eras he lived through, the holy trinity of Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, whom he knew intimately. He is therefore the man at rest in Warhol's video Sleep (1963). These artists who surrounded him only strengthened his desire to reinvent poetry. 'I want to cum in your heart', 'Eating the sky', 'I want it to rain for the rest of my life' . These phrases find their source as much in the founding fathers of the Beat Generation, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Gysin, of whom Giorno is the last smuggler, as well as within the New York rock underground and Tibetan Buddhist meditation of which he is a fervent practitioner. At Giorno, the notion of medium seems to remain accessory, as nothing seems to stop this great predText by Julie Boukobza