On the 16th of May, 1922, Vicente Huidobro held the vernissage for an exhibition of Creationist painted poems. These were the culmination of a decade's experimentation with calligrams, an artform he invented in Santiago, Chile, independently of either the experiments of Guillaume Apollinaire or the European tradition that stretched back to the Greek pastoralists.
Painted on various media, and combined with collage techniques, their mood fits in well with Huidobro's poems in Square Horizon and Regular Autumn, a sense of nostalgia in an observant tourist. A number of the paintings seem to combine to tell a story of watching the sun going down in a port and observing the place of the poet in the universe.
Lost in translation is the phonetic reading of the French title "Salle 14", which doubled as "Room 14" and "Dirty 14", a reference to the start of the First World War.
There are seven extant painted pictures: Ocean, Midnight, Piano, Marine, Sundown, Kaleidoscope, and 6 O'Clock October. The translator D.J.Pigott has made mimotype English versions of these using derived font calligraphy, and researching the unfaded colours of the originals. The translations have kept the slightly absurd sing-song rhyming of the original, which often created bizarre images to force a rhyme., This fits in with the Creationist notion of the poet creating the universe. As Huidobro himself wrote, a poet must "create poems as nature creates trees". Through the use of strange rhyming pairs, new worlds are constructed by the poet.
The two truly calligramatic poems, Windmill and Landscape, predate the exhibition and were likely simply painted. There are versions of the two painted in a Delaunay style by friends of the artists that are often used to complement the series. Instead of making mimotypes of those versions, it was decided to follow the example of 6 O'Clock October and have their text in different colours suiting the rhetorical and representational purpose.
The lost painted poem of the Eiffel Tower has been reconstructed from a sketch that exists, showing a distorted view of the tower from the base, with the very top missing. There is a widely circulated alternative rendering of the lost painting based on a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the wall of Huidobro's apartment at the time of the exhibition, next to some of the extant painted poems. Since the style is different to others (less reductive and more accurate) it was decided to follow the sketch instead.
The translator has also made three painted poems in homage to the three lost rainbow tableaux, drawing on the elements of the poems. They are included to make a complete set as images, but can be glossed over if preferred.
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