GHERASIM LUCA Apatride, 1913-1994

Stateless nationality (Romanian - before 1948 - at birth)

Born in 1913 in Bucharest (Kingdom of Romania)

Died in 1994 in Paris (France)

 

Gherasim Luca (1913 Bucharest - 1994 Paris) was a poet and artist of Romanian origin, most of whose work was published and written in French. Considered one of the founders of Romanian surrealism, in an avant-garde atmosphere led by Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi and Victor Brauner. He settled in France in 1952 and developed a singular and protean body of work.

An outstanding writer, described by Gilles Deleuze as "the greatest poet in the French language", Gherasim Luca is the "limit-hero" of the inventiveness of language and image, an inspired "cubomaniac" who traverses and probes the practices of poetry, photography, drawing, collage and book-objects, the inventor of "ontophony" as a new regime of poetic language and its possibilities of phonatory and visual expression.

After the Second World War, Luca explored a "non-œdipian" philosophical position and revalued the surreal dimension of art and life through the disconcerting operations of collage, montage, misappropriation and black humour, all surrealist procedures that evoke the marvellous and the disquieting.

« Cubomanie », the main series of Luca's visual work, which "makes the known unrecognisable", is a form of collage made from various photos and illustrations, but, above all, reproductions of paintings, cut into squares of equal dimensions. These squares are then glued together randomly to form a new image.

To create his Cubomanies, Gherasim Luca uses art from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, with a clear preference for the first two: two-thirds of the Cubomanies are based on a painting from one of these two centuries. An amalgam of fabrics and limbs, the poetics of stammering, the chaos of representation, a window on the world: the Cubomanies resonate with the dull vibration of the disquietingly strange, a Confidential Thunderbolt.