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Poumeyrol shares with Margotton a fascination for the interior landscape, where dimly illuminated grottos resonate with the remains of past epochs. And yet, his barren and abandoned spaces are often redolent with signs of the artists' own lost memories.
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JEAN-MARIE
POUMEYROL
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In his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized as a master of erotica, combining hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner (for example, Sabbat. This and other erotic works will be presented in Part II).
But, in his maturity, the artist has displayed a marked fascination for landscapes, particularly the enclosed spaces of sewers, industrial waste and disposal plants.
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Yet, the amazing accuracy and finesse of rendering which enlivened his early works has not left him and, if anything, only increased with age.
Poumeyrol was born in 1946 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bordeaux. Upon graduation he already had a four year old son to support, and so began his illustrious career as a teacher of mechanical draftsmanship (his students learned to draw screws, bolts, etc).
This occupation was mercifully cut short when he was released from the educational system. In fact, art teachers had to pass tests given by the board to determine if they were skilled enough to teach drawing. At the same time that Poumeyrol's erotic works were first seeing print and sought out avidly by collectors, he failed his art teacher's exam - being given an 'F' for nude drawing...
Encouraged by this failure, he dedicated himself to painting and drawing full time, eventually creating a large body of erotica which have marked him ever since (along with Sibylle Ruppert) as one of France's greatest artists in this domain.
A self-portrait from this period reveals the artist as ambulant and a dreamer - travelling in a train compartment encumbered by photo snapshots of his more personal memories. In essence, the artist's
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PARIS - FALL 2004
Self-portrait
in a Compartment - 1973
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working methods are well represented by this image: his preference for the 'in-between state' of revery and melancholy:
"As long as I can remember" Poumeyrol writes, "I have been faithfully accompanied by boredom. These sad and useless moments, like a pleasant emptiness, have invented those strange chimeras which continually wander into my visual memory. With time, this uncommon state between memory and imagination has matured into a kind of contemplation, and I have become a great connoisseur of solitude, prefering that boredom which accompanies all my wanderings into a world delicious, extravagant and vain." (68)
Despite the lucrative gains to be made from erotic art, the painter gradually moved beyond the female form, finding a greater fascination in the interior spaces devoid of nudes:
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