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| We only know that during his childhood and adolescence, Crépin loves music, plays the clarinet and composes polkas. He plays them in a little cafe held by his father who also runs a plumbing and roofing company. Later on, Crépin will direct the brass band of the Dourges Mines. He gets married in 1901 and has two daughters. The older one looses her mind at at the age of twenty-five. | ||
| Crépin tries out at different jobs, well digger, plumber, zinc worker, and ironmonger in Montigny-en-Gohelle, in the mining country. He starts his own business, a hardware store run by his wife. In 1930, Crépin meets Victor Simon, medium, painter and psychic, President of the Cercle d’études psychiatriques et spirites d’Arras, a disciple and friend of Augustin Lesage, who initiates him to spiritualism. He becomes a healer at the age of fifty-six and it is said that he has cured successfully through telepathy and at long distance. He develops an excellent reputation and people write to him to get his “talismans”. | ||
| His first drawing dates from 1938 when he is sixty-three. It is through copying a music score on the squares of a notebook and guided by the symmetry of the grids that he does his first improvised drawing. Convinced that he is inspired by his guardian angels, he begins what will become a rich artistic period leading to three hundred forty-five paintings in nine years. His oil paintings are all numbered starting with no.1 on April 1st, 1939, and are based on sketches transferred and enlarged onto canvases with the use of a compass and a ruler. Crépin’s paintings are easily identifiable by their hypnotic symmetry and their almost mechanical perfection. His themes are mostly architectural, temples, palaces, geometrical patterns (curves, volutes, arabesques, prisms, stars, crystals, and rosettes), to which he adds human figures and stylized animals. His motifs are decorated with perfectly calibrated pearled drops, a secretive process, which he will never reveal. His frontal lines are at times interrupted by effects which give depth to the work, disturbing its whole sense of logic and formality. The three dimensional space is forever abolished. The palaces from the thousand and one nights conceal decorative elements from his everyday life, like the brick pediments found on the facades of houses in Northern France. Crépin said he used to hear music while he was painting. | ||
| Persuaded of his power to end wars, he convinces himself that the Second World War will end when he finishes his three hundredth painting. As it happens, his three hundredth painting is dated May 7th, 1945. He also said to have heard voices predicting his death at the time of his three hundred forty-fifth painting. Things turned out differently: he died of a stroke sooner than expected. | ||
| According to his wish, he was buried with all the drawings that he made as sketches for his paintings. It is said that Crépin’s paintings have magic and healing powers. | ||
| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de l’Art Brut,
fascicule 5, Paris, 1965. DERŒUX (Didier). Fleury-Joseph Crépin, texts of André Breton, Jean Dubuffet, Vincent Bounoure, Jean-Louis Lanoux, José Pierre, Louis Seguin, Pierre Gode Berge, Idée d’Art, 2000. |
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