Mr  Laurent Danchin is a well know French writer on art and art critic. He wrote the following text as an introduction to the exposition devoted to Chomo, Halles Saint Pierre, Paris, oct 2009 - march 2010 (this translation published here by permission of Halles Saint Pierre)

Tribute to Chomo (1907-1999)

Ten years ago Chomo died, the hermit in the forest of Fontainebleau, overall artist, similtaneously poet, musician, painter, sculptor, architect and author of a film that recapitulated  his work, longer than the Mahabharata: Le Débarquement Spirituel. A true living legend, whose imprint is deep on all who met him.

Thousands of visitors from all walks have been admitted over the years in the mythical territory of his Village d’Art Préludien in the community of Achères-la-Forêt, not far from the Cyclope of Tinguely and the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, where Cocteau is buried, in Milly-la-Foret. From England, the United States, Germany, Japan, television came to film the Eglise des Pauvres, the Sanctuaire des Bois Brûlés or the Refuge, three masterpieces of spontaneous architecture Chomo made,  like all his work, from recycled materials: dead wood from the forest, wire, plaster, bottles, plates of cars, gathered from the underbrush, junk yards and automobile dismantlers nearby.

Already in 1960, the last of the Surrealists, André Breton, Dali, Joyce Mansour, Henri Michaux, but also Cocteau, Anaïs Nin, the painter Atlan, the gallery owners Claude Bernard and Iris Clert and even Picasso had admired in Paris, the Bois Brûlés by Chomo, his assemblages of glass and  torned canvasses in the only exhibition he had to agree too before withdrawing from the world.

Subsequently, in the footsteps of Clara Malraux, appointed at the time by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs to protect the site in its infancy, personalities as diverse as Bernard Anthonioz, Jacques Attali, Henri-Claude Cousseau, Jean-Hubert Martin have gone to the "kingdom" of Chomo, to meet more closely the one,  who also said to be a medium and a healer, who lived in such a symbiotic relationship with his bees, that a “shocking” sequence  has been devoted to him (note 1), in 1965, in a film by Edouard Logereau (called). Paris-Secret

Bernard Lassus, Michel Ragon, the painters Jean Revol, Lisette Combe and Jean de  Maximy, the sculptor Josette Rispal, the photographer Jean-Paul Vidal, Marcus Schubert, Jean-Claude David, Pascal Brousse, Minot-Gormezano, the psychiatrist Ferdière Gaston, Michel Thévoz from the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Jean-Paul Favand from the Musée des Arts Forain,  John Maizels from the international magazine Raw Vision, and many others were among the admirers and defenders of the universe of Chomo.

Clovis Prevost and Antoine Maximy have devoted a film to him. I myself collected the memories and thoughts of Chomo, in an iconoclastic book, published in 1978. France Inter, France Culture, Radio Libertaire came to record the sonorous  poetry, experimental music and detonating words of the ecologist avant la lettre, great opponent of the consumer society, to whom for a time even a foundation has been  dedicated with the aim to  protect the site and the work of Chomo.

But Chomo was an inveterate, and if he had decided to continue his work outside the gallery circuit and the market, paying for his rebellion the high price of discomfort and loneliness, it was to preserve his total freedom of mind and creation, to make known his pathway without hindrance to all those he took in thrall of his dream, and to remain faithful to the end to his rebellion against a society he considered seriously delinquent, on a planet itself in great danger.

Since ten years, the universe of Chomo is no more accessible to the public, and this unforgettable creator, this visionary tormented by all the excesses of inspiration, author of hundreds of experiences of all kinds in sculpture, painting, poetry, music, cinema, is about to disappear from the screen of our memories.

It became time for France to recognize this extraordinary artist, too long confined to the curiosities along the side of the roads (note 2), and pay tribute to what the British singer Jarvis Cocker, in his road movie Journeys Into the Outside, filmed in the same year as the death of Chomo, already considered a monument of the twentieth century. It will be the honor and pride of the Halle Saint Pierre to have had, as the first, this concern and  this privilege. May, in this momentum, the government take the decisions that are necessary to devote to Chomo, on the place where he lived, the museum he deserves.

Laurent Danchin

notes

1. this refers to sequences in the flm, where Chomo appears, his face covered with bees

2. in the original curiosités du bords des routes, probably a paraphrase of les inspirés du bord des routes, the title of a book by Jacques Lacarrière and Jacques Verroust on outsider environments in France