French painter, illustrator, sculptor and theatre designer, born in 1929 in Marseille, died in 2012 in Argenteuil.
Life
Jacques Carelman settled in Paris in 1956. There he practised as a dentist, alongside a highly varied artistic activity: humorous drawing, book illustration, painting, sculpture.
From 1962 he designed sets and costumes for the theatre, notably for plays by Molière, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Raymond Queneau. In 1966 he adapted Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro as a comic strip, published by Gallimard. One of the posters of May 1968, showing a menacing riot policeman, truncheon in hand, is attributed to him.
He joined the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 1969, where he became a Regent, holder of the chair of Helicology (the study of the gidouille, the spiral adorning Père Ubu’s belly). In 1980 he was one of the founders of the Ouvroir de peinture potentielle (OuPeinPo), the pictorial counterpart of the Oulipo.
The work
He is best known for the Catalogue d’objets introuvables (Catalogue of Unfindable Objects), published by Balland in 1969: a parody of the Manufrance mail-order catalogue, listing absurd objects such as the radiator-armchair, the converging tandem or the coffee pot for masochists, its spout turned towards the person pouring. The book was translated into nineteen languages and reissued by Le Cherche Midi in 1999 and 2010. It was followed by the Petit supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1971) and the Catalogue de timbres-poste introuvables (1972), reissued by Cartouche in 2011.
Carelman also built sculpture-machines based on literature: Mécaniques pour Cyrano (1965), La Hie et le Diamant after Raymond Roussel, Machine à inspirer l’amour after Alfred Jarry, Machine de la colonie pénitentiaire after Kafka (1975). For the OuPeinPo he invented variable-symmetry painting, chronological collage and quarter-turn painting (La Rose des têtes). As an illustrator he provided images for The Thousand and One Nights, La Fontaine’s Fables in rebus form and texts by Noël Arnaud, François Caradec and Claude Roy.
Exhibitions
- Unfindable objects made in three dimensions, Vieille Charité, Marseille, November 1974 to January 1975
- “Les Machines célibataires” (The Bachelor Machines), touring exhibition conceived by Harald Szeemann, 1975
- Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles: La Machine à inspirer l’amour after Jarry, in “At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty”, 25 October to 30 November 2024