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Guillaume Pujolle
French
nationality
Born in Saint-Gaudens on June 18th, 1893
Dies in 1951
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| Guillaume Pujolle's father is a cabinetmaker, specialized
in restoring works of art. A gambler, deep into debt, he dies at the age
of fifty-five. Guillaume has been working since his adolescence in his father's
workshop. He gets married in 1924, moves to Metz and works as a customs
officer. He terrifies his wife: he is tyrannical, obsessed with order, pathologically
jealous and paranoid. In 1926, he tries to slit his throat with a knife.
He is immediately hospitalized. In his delirium he wants the death of his
wife whom he thinks is unfaithful to him. He also imagines she has a daughter
who follows him and spies on him. |
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| By the end of the year, he leaves the hospital, but
suffering from hallucinations, he threatens to kill his wife and himself.
He has to be institutionalized permanently. His wife wants to stay with
him and is allowed to work in the asylum as a nurse. His first drawings
can be dated around 1935, when he is forty-two. He is inspired by magazines,
working from images he cuts out. He uses a compass, a ruler and brushes
made with locks of his own hair. He also uses ink or pencil, and pharmaceutical
solutions as Iodine and Mercurochrome. |
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| His imaginary world is dominated by swirling motions,
filled with threatening night birds and strange figures. Even though Pujolle's
works are not explicitly sexual, they release a tactile and erotic sensation.
"One can feel the metabolism of the composition, the rotation of the axis,
the innervation of the lines, the fluidity of the ink, the saturation of
the paper, in a sort of physiological affinity. Nowhere else could we sense
as much the bodily and libidinal genealogy of the forms, nor feel their
dynamic motions. This leads us to believe that sexuality has lost its fondness
for the objects that are assigned to it to rediscover the nomadic and polymorph
characteristic it had at an embryonic stage during its early childhood."
(Michel Thévoz, L'Art Brut, Albert Skira, Geneva, 1975.) |
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| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de
l'Art Brut, fascicule 4, Paris, 1965. |
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