David D’Agostino is a conceptual collagist who creates visual poems that combine familiar architectonic-geometric forms with gestural applications of letters, cut photographs, plastic containers, seeds, and laser-cut shapes.
The constructions coincide in their minimalist, hypergraphic approach to letrism, a visual concrete poetry movement founded in the 1950s by the Romanian avant garde poet and visual artist Isidore Isou. Hypergraphy merges poetry (text) with more visual (graphic) ways of communication such as painting, illustration, or signs. In each work, painted or adhesive letters are placed among multi-various shapes and objects on wood panels. Each design suggests the figurative and the architectural, but D’Agostino refuses to allow the work to coalesce into a representational thesis. He may use strong symbols, like guns, elk, soldiers, toads, but these designs are presented on equal terms to any letter in any language. D’Agostino superimposes audio readings, often performed by amateurs, to lift the static encumbrance of the physical poem to produce verbo-visual collage.
