French draughtsman and maker of assemblages, born on 30 April 1927 in Marseille, died on 12 January 2021.
Life
After the École des Chartreux in Marseille, Louis Pons trained as a fitter at the École des métiers d’Endoume, without ever practising the trade. At the Liberation he drew for the Marseille newspapers born of the Resistance. At twenty-one he spent a year and a half at the Hauteville sanatorium.
He then lived in villages of Haute-Provence, the Alpes-Maritimes, the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Var: Montfroc, Simiane-la-Rotonde, Vence, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Aix-en-Provence, Antibes, Sillans-la-Cascade. The works of Joë Bousquet and Louis Soutter, like Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, confirmed him in his vocation. He settled in Paris in 1973.
Alphonse Chave, in Vence, exhibited him from 1952; then came the Galerie Le Point Cardinal (1969-1983), followed by the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris (1984-2003). Agnès Varda filmed him in The Gleaners and I.
The work
Between 1948 and 1969 Pons made some two thousand drawings in Indian ink, made of interwoven, superimposed lines from which ambiguous beings emerge, half-human, half-animal or plant. In 1959 he composed his first assemblages, reliefs built from discarded objects, shown in 1962 at Alphonse Chave’s. Where others see a heap of rubbish, he saw a reservoir of possibilities. His work oscillates between nightmare and fantasy, often tempered by humour.
“Art should shut people up.” (Louis Pons, “Louis Pons par Louis Pons”, 1983)
The gallery presents Grands docks (1998, mixed media, 182 x 126 cm), a large format chosen for the poster of the 2023 retrospective and reproduced in its catalogue, shown in the exhibition “Favourites: Art Brut, Naive Art, Art Singulier” (15 March to 18 April 2024).
Exhibitions and collections
- “Louis Pons, braconnier de l’art”, Musée Hébert, La Tronche, 2013
- Retrospective, Lympia, departmental cultural centre, Nice, then Marseille, 2023 (Silvana catalogue)