From 27 November 2025 to 8 January 2026
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
In collaboration with Maître Aymeric Rouillac
From Josette Rispal’s L’Humanité to Chomo’s Bois brûlés (Burnt Woods).
L’Humanité was shown in 2016 for nine months in the church of La Madeleine.
The Bois brûlés were Chomo’s only exhibition, at the Galerie Jean Camion, in 1960.
“Sculptor, what’s all this? It’s crap!” Chomo shouted in July 1984 at the woman who dared to cross the fences of his Village d’Art Préludien at Achères-la-Forêt. Yet since 1975 Josette Rispal had been sculpting bronze, iron, terracotta and Murano glass. Both artists share a will to transform rejects into works of art, to transmute matter. This mutual recognition would therefore become a singular friendship between Josette Rispal and Chomo. For “the Hermit of Achères”, then without much means, Josette Rispal became accomplice and patron, and in 1991 organised an exhibition for Chomo throughout Milly-la-Forêt, which was a great success. It is the story of this very close, affectionate relationship between two artists of great generosity, two kindred spirits, that we tell in the exhibition presented at the Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles.
Chomo (Roger-Edmond Chomeaux, known as), 1907-1999. His Burnt Woods, the story of a break
At fifty-three, in 1960, Chomo broke with the contemporary art of his time, which for him was a formatted art, as a true radical secessionist. Michel Thévoz says that he prefigures in a utopian mode a dissolution of art through its extension into reality, illustrating in advance the May 68 slogan “Art will be alive when the last artist is dead”. Salvage and recycling lie at the heart of his new practices. For Chomo, every fragment of a discarded object then becomes raw material (cut, slashed, burnt), generating a new vocabulary (see the analytical text by Françoise Monnin in Chomo, ed. Aymeric Rouillac). From this point of view the burnt woods are his most accomplished expression. Fascinated by lightning and the combustion of wood, Chomo fixes the incandescent matter, lets fire carve into the wood, which he will then tar and later paint.
Sixty-five years on, let us bring back to life the first and last exhibition of Chomo’s Burnt Woods, then called “Expressions noires”, at the Galerie Camion, 8 rue des Beaux-Arts. 40,000 people visited it in six weeks, but Chomo the rebel, furious at the commercial success that was looming, torpedoed the exhibition. In 1961 Chomo, now “the Hermit of the Fontainebleau forest”, built the sanctuary of the Burnt Woods in his Village-Centre d’Art Préludien. The constructions were completed in 1963, and part of them can still be visited today.
Thanks to Télérama and Bénédicte Philippe for their review of the exhibition (TTT).
Artists: Josette Rispal, Roger Chomeaux
Works shown
- Josette Rispal, Témoins de l’Humanité, 2013-2015, brushed metal, Murano glass, from 160 to 207 cm
- Chomo, Fétiche à clous, circa 1960, burnt wood and metal, reworked in the 1990s, height 123 cm, Chomo collection
- Chomo, Totem, circa 1960, burnt wood, 87 x 35 x 26 cm