From 12 May to 1 July 2017
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
After secondary school in Le Havre and Savoie, Pierre Bettencourt attended Paul Valéry’s course in poetics at the Collège de France.
A writer and visual artist, he printed his first texts on his own hand press, in the family house at Saint-Maurice-d’Ételan, which was occupied by the Germans.
Throughout his life, besides his own works, he also published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, Bernard Collin and Jean Dubuffet. He himself wrote under his own name but also under pseudonyms; thus he signed his erotic works Jean Sadinet.
From 1941 he devoted himself to typography and published, still on his own press, his first books, often with singular, poetic or sarcastic colophons, as well as unpublished texts by Henri Michaux (Tu vas être père), Antonin Artaud (Le Théâtre de Séraphin), his friend Dubuffet (Plukifekler), Francis Ponge (Le Galet), etc. He did not hesitate to call on the greatest names to illustrate the books he published, while shunning media attention.
In 1953, after a stay at Saint-Michel-de-Chaillol with Dubuffet, Bettencourt composed his first high reliefs, in which unconventional materials (fragments of slate, coffee beans, eggshells…) are set on painted grounds, giving the figures their singular texture and their unsettling thickness.
Essentially thanato-erotic, these high reliefs belong to the realm of Art Brut. They express the mysterious and sacred character of life while revealing the artist’s fantasies with an innocent crudeness.
Bettencourt was one of the contemporary artists exhibited (and collected) by Daniel Cordier in the 1950s and 1960s.
Pierre Bettencourt lived in Stigny from 1963. He was married to Monique Apple. He was the brother of the industrialist and politician André Bettencourt.
Artist: Pierre Bettencourt