Louis Pons (1927 - 2021)

L’exposition rend hommage à l’œuvre de Louis Pons, artiste d’origine marseillaise, et révèle son univers singulier à travers près d’une centaine de dessins et d’assemblages en trois dimensions provenant de collections particulières et d’institutions muséales. Couvrant toute sa carrière, des années 1950 à nos jours, elle témoigne de la diversité technique et de l’évolution de son œuvre, où se déploie un univers fantastique et onirique, parfois teinté d’humour, qui ne laisse pas indifférent.

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Louis Pons (1927-2021) was initially an exceptional sketch artist, recognisable by the line that he intertwined and superimposed until it created the emergence of enigmatic beings whose nature – human, animal or plant – remains ambiguous.
From 1959, Louis Pons transposed his universe into assemblages that were exhibited at the galerie Chave in 1962, then at Le Point Cardinal and the galerie Claude Bernard in 1984. From these bits of nothing, these discarded objects that, dispossessed of their function, are nothing more than the carcass of themselves, he tirelessly created objects that give rise to an almost magical power of attraction and repulsion in the viewer.
Louis Pons, a man of words, lines and traces, takes us into a sometimes nightmarish world on the borders of a fantasy universe, when it is not kept at bay by a humour that dissipates its monstrousness.
The exhibition catalogue reproduces more than one hundred works, both drawings and assemblages by Louis Pons. His entire period of activity is represented and allows us to appreciate the unity and coherence of the work of this singular artist.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

A retrospective here and now
Adrien Bossard and Claude Miglietti

The sorcerer’s apron
Philippe Dagen

The ball, the box and the heap
Frédéric Valabrègue

Dessins, assemblages et aphorismes

Unbridled hybrids, butchered hybrids
François Bazzoli

Farewell to the mummies
Rebecca Zoubrinetzky

Autopsy of a mummy
Philippe Charlier

Letter to Germain Viatte, 1988
Louis Pons

A Chronology of Truancy
Frédéric Valabrègue

Louis Pons at the “Pawnshop”.
The Friendship between Louis Pons and Lucien Henry, Second-hand Shop Owner and Art Dealer in Forcalquier
Isabelle Laban-Dal Canto

Drawings and Envelopes
Rebecca Zoubrinetzky

Chronology of Fil noir
[The Black Thread]
Louis Pons

Anthologie de textes

Louis Pons
Christian Dotremont

The Imprecise is Mixed with the Precise
Louis Pons, Kristell Loquet

Joë Bousquet, Gérald Neveu :
They Were the Two Great Encounters of My Life.
Interview with Louis Pons
Alain Paire

Louis Pons
François Chapon

Now, Being Lost in the World
Pierre Tilman

The Man with the Walking Stick
Christer Strömholm

A Silent Friendship
Anatole Desachy and Brigitte Ollier

Liste des oeuvres exposées
Bibliographie sélective, archives
Liste des expositions