French artist Chomo scraped away all formal teaching to conjure up the Village d’Art Préludien, a unique place of creation, preservation and refuge
On Thursday, September 10, 2009, the Halle SaintPierre was alive with the buzz of a major opening night. The work of “Chomo” was being shown by art critic Laurent Danchin and the museum’s director Martine Lusardy in the exhibition “Le Débarquement Spirituel” (The Spiritual Landing). Chomo – also known as “the hermit of the Forest of Fontainebleau” – had not exhibited in Paris since 1960 at the Jean Camion gallery on Rue des Beaux-Arts. The show, “Expressions Noires de Chomo” (Black Expressions of Chomo), was an artistic success but a commercial failure. Le Monde reported: “On the day of the opening, 3,500 people were present, the Rue des Beaux-Arts completely blocked. André Breton spent hours there. Dalí swooned. Picasso came as well. So did Cocteau, who was insulted by Chomo, and Henri Michaux, who was told that he ‘smelled of a corpse’.
A collector negotiates the purchase of a sculpture. A discount is about to be offered when Chomo overhears the conversation: ‘For God’s sake, Camion, are you selling cheese? Get out of here, sir!’” From that point on, Chomo withdrew completely into the Forest of Fontainebleau – 60 km to the southeast of Paris – at the heart of which he built the Village d’Art Préludien on a hectare of sandy woodland. He became reclusive and would remain so for almost three decades.
inside The Church of the Poor in 1984; photo: L Danchin
Born Roger Chomeaux in 1907, the artist came from a family of small shopkeepers in Berlaimont, northern France, far from Paris and the art world. His talent for modelling in clay was noticed by a teacher who sent him to the art school Académies de Valenciennes, from where he graduated in 1925. Moving to Paris, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts until 1928. He went on to marry, had four children with his wife Germaine, and worked as a decorator while also spending time making art. Mobilised in 1940, Chomeaux was taken prisoner by the Germans and interned for a year and a half in a stalag in Poland. Feigning deafness, he was released on medical grounds and returned to civilian life but was unable to confine himself within any norm – familial, social or artistic. This is when he broke decisively with the academic art world and began to spend time in the Forest of Fontainebleau experimenting artistically – using only found materials, working in close harmony with the natural environment – while also making a living doing odd jobs as a dock porter at Paris’s Les Halles.
The Centaur, c. 1970, wire mesh and painted plaster, 17.5 x 47.5 x 34 in. / 45 x 121 x 86 cm; photo: P Rouillac
Around this time he became interested in the Lettrist avant-garde of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Founded in Paris in 1945 to 1946 by poet Isidore Isou, Lettrism focussed on the letter, sound and visual sign as the core elements of artistic expression. With a poet friend, Chomeaux invented a new simplified language, both meta-poetic and phonetic. Thus “Chomeaux” became “Chomo”
By AYMERIC ROUILLAC
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #127.
