French painter, sculptor, architect, poet and filmmaker, born Roger Chomeaux on 28 January 1907 in Berlaimont (Nord), died on 19 June 1999 in Achères-la-Forêt (Seine-et-Marne).
Life
Roger Chomeaux studied at the art school in Valenciennes from 1921 to 1925, then at the École des beaux-arts in Paris from 1926 to 1928. To earn a living he worked as a carpet designer for a firm in the Paris region. Taken prisoner during the Second World War, he was deported to Poland. After the war he took up gouache and ceramics and tried his hand at film.
In May 1960 the Galerie Jean Camion, 8 rue des Beaux-Arts, showed his Burnt Woods (Bois brûlés) under the title “Expressions noires”. The exhibition drew a large public, including André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Picasso, but Chomo, furious at the commercial success that was looming, torpedoed it. At fifty-three he broke with the art of his time and adopted the name Chomo.
He withdrew to Achères-la-Forêt, in the forest of Fontainebleau, on a plot his wife had bought twenty years earlier, in a prefabricated house without running water or heating. Having become “the Hermit of the Fontainebleau forest”, he lived there alone for some forty years and built his Village d’art préludien.
The work
Salvage and recycling are at the heart of his practice. Fascinated by lightning and combustion, Chomo let fire carve into wood, which he then tarred and painted: these are the Burnt Woods. In the forest he raised three architecture-sculptures, the Refuge, the Church of the Poor and the Sanctuary of the Burnt Woods (begun in 1961, the constructions completed in 1963), using plaster, wire mesh, bottles, dead wood and plastic waste mixed with earth and stone.
For Michel Thévoz, he prefigures “in a utopian mode a dissolution of art through its extension into reality”. At eighty he began filming Le Débarquement spirituel. Images de lumière with the director Clovis Prévost, lit by Jean-Pierre Nadau; a forty-minute version, edited by Frédéric Michaudet, was released in 2019.
“We must recreate a clean religion, a religion of purity. We must start again from zero.” (Chomo)
Exhibitions and collections
- “Expressions noires”, Galerie Jean Camion, Paris, 1960
- Village d’art préludien, Achères-la-Forêt: a site preserved since 2015 by the Association des Amis de Chomo, open to visitors
- Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles: “Josette Rispal and Chomo”, 27 November 2025 to 8 January 2026, in collaboration with Maître Aymeric Rouillac