Background
Louis Pons was born in 1927 in Marseilles, France. He grew up in a poor neighborhood, a time that taught him to have humor and always be resourceful.
Louis Pons was born in 1927 in Marseilles, France. He grew up in a poor neighborhood, a time that taught him to have humor and always be resourceful.
Louis trained to be a locksmith and always found refuge in literature.
After the war, Louis worked as a cartoonist for various newspapers, but at the age of 21 he fell ill and was forced to spend one and a half year in a sanatorium. When he got better, he moved to the country where he went fishing in the morning and drew in the afternoon. He made thousands of drawings using India ink, depicting a fantastic world with strange animals, hybrid beings, and weird settings.
Drawing became the basis of his life. In 1959 he started to have vision problems and that was when he started collecting various objects - an action that is now known as "assemblages" - from which he built boxes and reliquaries. Those were also fantastic, funny and strange. Louis Pons's body of work is unique, difficult to classify, surrounded by secrets and characterized by its own poetic ethnology.
Pons explains his artistic process and understanding of art as what others see as "a cluster of junk", he sees as "a cluster of possibilities"; and that the function of art is to tidy up one's inner and exterior worlds.
Quotations:
"One's own nightmare is better than another's dream."
"People's waste is a lost museum."
