French draughtsman, known as Cako, born in 1925 in Biarritz, died on 9 March 2021 in Montpellier.
Life
Abandoned as a child by his mother, who came from the aristocracy and was connected to the Spanish crown, Charles Boussion barely knew his father, who disappeared very early. As a child he moved in the circles of the Russian emigration. As a young man he joined the Zazou movement and entered the Resistance during the war.
In 1946 he married Bernadette Morelon de Beaulieu, then eighteen; they had a daughter, Marie-Hélène. For many years he was a sales representative for L.T. Piver perfumes. A serious car accident plunged him into deep depression, and on emerging from it, at around fifty, supported by his wife, he began to draw.
The work
Bernadette was his muse and his model. Boussion endlessly reworked the same photocopied photograph of her, heightening it with gouache, felt-tip, ballpoint and highlighter, and often reworking it again by photocopying the piece anew. She becomes a Madonna, a Virgin and Child, or a mixed-race or Black pin-up, but never white. The central image changes little; it is the ornaments surrounding it that vary.
These ornaments borrow from the tradition of the icon, Moorish goldsmithing and illumination, mixing Eastern influences, Baroque exuberance, Russian religiosity, travel memories and Basque references. On the back, most works bear handwritten texts, poetic or memorial; Cako is part of his signature. The collector and gallerist Pascal Saumade has assembled more than three thousand of his works.
Exhibitions and collections
- Acquisitions 2012-2018, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, 2018
- Art Brut : Frame Work, Collection de l’Art Brut, 2021
- Croyances, Art Brut biennial, Collection de l’Art Brut, 17 December 2021 to 24 April 2022