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François Le Goff
French
nationality
Born in Brest in July 1916
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| We do not know much about his life. He grows up in
a working class environment, goes to elementary school and becomes a sheet
metal worker at the Arsenal of Brest. He accomplishes his military obligations
in the Navy and is imprisoned during the war. His mother dies during the
bombardments. Hallucinating and suffering from a sense of persecution, he
is hospitalized from the 50s on in different psychiatric institutions until
he ends up in Quimper. He was never trained to become an artist. His whole
production (a dozen oil paintings on board) dates from 1957. François Le
Goff has also written Secrets de la défense nationale and La Philosophie
de la psychiatrie. In his delirium, he considers himself a "Colonel
Marshal" in the Secret Service. A serious pulmonary illness forces him to
interrupt his activities. His mental state worsens. He is no longer interested
in anything. When he is questioned about his works, he gives only few and
poor explanations. |
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| The construction of his paintings is made without any
sense of perspective, everything being voluntarily flattened. The image
is seen from the front, as if we were faced with the wall. If a waterfall
ran through, it would carry nothing with it. There is no flow, the current
is interrupted, nothing can possibly move. Everything is desperately motionless;
as if poured into concrete, as are his figures (mysterious Buddhas or wooden
toys?), his stiff snakes reaching up to a non-existent sky, his skeleton
like plants. The symbolism is so apparent that one could think of naive
figurations, even surrealistic compositions. An obvious uneasiness erases
all warmth. The determination to crush everything is so strong that it leaves
no room for genre scenes. |
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| A disturbing density, not the usual one coming from
pulling forces, but the one coming from enemies who find themselves within
him, in the same bed. |
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| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de
l'Art Brut, fascicule 8, Paris, 1966. |
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