The story behind
Christian Dotremont (1922-1979) was a Belgian painter, writer and poet.
As a young artist, Dotremont was closely associated with Surrealism. Along with Noël Arnaud and Edouard Jaguer he founded the artists’ movement Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire. Later the CoBrA movement in Belgium would emerge from this initiative. Dotremont got an important role in the establishment of CoBrA. He wrote the pamphlet by which the movement was founded. Only a few months later, Pierre Alechinsky became a member. Dotremont and Alechinsky were the driving forces behind the CoBrA movement in Belgium.
He often worked together with painters, making works that combined texts, painting and fabric, called Peinture-mots. Typical of his work is the use of his own handwriting, in order to create made-up characters in black ink, called logograms. This was a form of visual poetry.