Over the last year I got interested in the structure of poems, their rhyme and meter. There are 15 possible rhyme schemes in a four line poem, or quatrain -- AAAA, AAAB, AABA, AABB, AABC, ABAA, ABAB, ABAC, ABBA, ABBB, ABBC, ABCA, ABCB, ABCC, and ABCD. AABA, for example, means that the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme, but the third doesn’t. These two poems are part of a larger, and ongoing, body of work using corporate names and logos to explore the structure of the quatrain.
Sylvan Lionni is a Eugene, Oregon based artist. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Futures Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; Taubert Contemporary, Berlin; Stene Projects, Stockholm; and KANSAS, New York. Lionni’s work has been included in exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum of Art, MoMA P.S. 1, Socrates Sculpture Park, and mumok. His work has appeared, or been reviewed in ArtForum, Svenska Dagbladet, Art in America, Flash Art, and Architectural Digest among others. He is represented by Taubert Contemporary in Berlin.