Alain Arias-Misson, born in Brussels, Belgium, who grew up in New York City, and has lived and worked in Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Italy and France (where he presently resides), for several decades has driven three horses which appeared to canter in wildly divergent directions:

1) narrative, in the context of the New American Fiction, with four novels, recently, Theatre of Incest published by Dalkey Archive Press, December 2007; his next novel, Tintin or the Return of the Mother of the Maya" will be published in 2009. Stories and essays in various periodicals. "The Visitor", a third art book by Arias-Misson, published in Italy in April 2009 by Ulise & Calipso, sums up his poetic work under the following two sections.

2) poetic experimentation starting in the early sixties - in Spain, Belgium (where he became co-editor with Paul De Vree of de Tafelrond, and Italy (as co-editor of Logomotives) - as one of the score of innovators around the world of "visual poetry" in the sixties, which broke with the orthodoxy of a "concretist" poetry to achieve the convergence of image, sound, and word on canvas, objects and video. His work has been shown in hundreds of exhibitions and published in scores of anthologies in Europe, the United States, South America and Japan. While the principle of a language-based visual poetics has remained the matrix of this work, he has gone beyond its standard perimeter in the last twenty years, for example with the construction of a Shamanic Observatory in an eighteenth century sculpture garden outside Milan (Villa Buttafava foundation, Gallarate). Significant recent group exhibitions include "Word and image since 1910", at the Museum of Modern Art of Rovereto; the Biennale de Lyon, the Poésure et Peintrie show at the Museums of Marseille, recently OPEN, the International Open-Air Sculpture and Installation show held on the Lido together with the Venice Film Festival in September, 2004, the Lodz Biennale, Poland, and, most recently, the 51st Venice Biennale, in the Collateral Event, "Poles Together, Poles Apart".. His work is present in museums and prestigious private collections around the world from the Getty Museum in California to the Bolzano Museum in Italy, the State Museum in Amsterdam and the Stuttgart State Museum in Germany etc.. Recent personal shows include the Emily Harvey Gallery in New York and in Venice, 2001-2002, Galérie Lara Vincy in Paris, 2003, the Lazzari Cultural Space in Treviso Italy, the Depardieu Gallery, Nice (2006) and the Jean-Paul Perrier Gallery in Barcelona (2007). Coming shows in 2009 include individual exhibitions at Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris, in November; Entropyart Gallery in Naples, May and Depardieu Gallery, Nice, June 28; group exhibitions include Collages at the Verbeke Foundation, Antwerp; the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art, Madrid, in December 2009.

3) the third horse is the Public Poem, an urban poetic form which he invented in 1965 and has enacted every three or four years ever since, sometimes commissioned by a cultural institution (by the City of Bonn for the Beethoven Bicentennial in 1970, by the Beaubourg, La Revue Parlée in 1988, the Deutsche Literatur Haus, Hamburg and Berlin, 1991 etc.), but often produced outside any artistic framework (such as the Public Sixtine Chapel Shamanic Poem in the Vatican, 1994, or the Public Surveillance Poem in the République Metro in Paris in June of 2003), the Public Poem "tears" the textual fabric of the city at a given site, using specific street-elements (traffic, monuments, commercial and financial institutions, people movements) as the syntactic and semantic elements of a dream-text which emerges with the "interruption" (traffic, police) of the city text.

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