Spatialisation littéraire et picturale, une interaction artistique dans la poésie de Maurice Carême

Maurice Carême (1899–1978) was a Belgian francophone poet who was in contact with a great number of painters through correspondence, either as a friend or for professional reasons. Among these artists were Henri-Victor Wolvens, Marcel Delmotte and Felix De Boeck. Besides the illustrations that they made in order to decorate Carême’s books of poetry, their exchange and their complicity were also of a great importance, being a sort of artistic interaction between fine arts and poetry. The common sources of painting and poetry are the following : the power to watch and to stabilise the image and the capacity to show the image itself and the relations that connect the images. The reader of Carême’s books is confronted to a composition of texts and images. The book made of poems and drawings becomes a space which is textual and also visual, a space which is literary and pictorial at the same time. The layout evokes an experience which is simoultaneously verbal and visual, relating to a fusion between several ways of expression, where the interference between image and text exceeds largely the books of poems in question.