GUILLAUME PUJOLLE. PAINTING, A PLACE OF BEING

In Guillaume Pujolle. Painting, a place of being, Blandine Ponet sets out on the traces of Guillaume Pujolle (1893-1971) who was a carpenter, customs officer, but also painter. He was interned for a large part of his life in the Braqueville asylum, Toulouse; this is where Blandine Ponet left from, where she herself works as a psychiatric nurse. From there, she pulls the threads of the complex destiny of the artist, which also leads him to look into the history of the psychiatry, surrealism, art brut or the devastating first world war world. This is his way of fighting against "forgetting, immobility, the absence of history, order and routine." Finding a few names, a few dates, a few facts that make up an inextricable ball of the past, that saves vertigo in the face of an "illegible world". For Blandine Ponet, this is a first not to grasp the disconcerting art of Guillaume Pujolle, to achieve look at his paintings in all their sharp and colorful violence: "The form and the path that leads there, says Paul Klee. Taming Pujolle's paintings, build one's own perspective and way of seeing and understanding them. Tame what they contain and transmit of madness and pain for to finally be able to look at them." Retracing the history of the painter and his work, It is learning to see in a more accurate, more vibrant way. Blandine Ponet thus seeks to go back to the first events which bear witness to a emerging recognition of the artist. When an exhibition of works by sick people was organized in 1946 at the Sainte-Anne hospital by Doctor Gaston Ferdière, who also took care of Antonin Artaud, we could see, among others, The Death of the old Boer by Guillaume Pujolle. The following year, on the occasion of The exhibition Surrealism in 1947 at the Maeght gallery, we could see a strange revolver made by Guillaume Pujolle. In her story, Blandine Ponet also restores all their intensity to fragments of the history of a century, in evoking the shock that the first war constituted for Guillaume Pujolle, who was mobilized for the four years it lasted. A shock that can be anticipated in several of his paintings, notably in his series of boats: "Except one or two that are not named, they mostly have specific names that return: Lutetia, Provence, Normandy, Sirocco. […] The Provence was a transatlantic liner that was launched in 1906. Converted into a cruiser, it served also to the transport of troops to the Dardanelles in January 1915. As for the Lutetia was an auxiliary cruiser that was also assigned to transport troops in Salonika from 1915 to 1917." Guillaume Pujolle himself spent two years in Salonika during the war, which he probably remembers when painting these "impetuous and abundant" waves. Look carefully at the paintings of Guillaume Pujolle then returns to drawing their plastic power from oblivion as striking as the violence of the torments of the last century.