(Born in 1949 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe)
It is not easy to keep up with Eugène Lambourdière, called “Maurice”. When the collector Éric Gauthier discovered him in 2017, Maurice lived on the street and was drawing with a ballpoint pen on standard sheets of paper. He was designing plans for “identified flying objects” of his own invention—these were the first drawings presented at Galerie du moineau écarlate in February this year.
Today, Maurice has a roof over his head, a “room to his own”. He has begun drawing on larger paper, built several scale models of his flying machines, and launched into collage with the same frenzy that characterizes his drawing practice. Collage allows him to bring together the various elements of his world—drawings of his inventions, mystical and popular imagery, personal documents, esoteric interpretations, etc. It also gives him the opportunity to stage himself by means of self-portraits imbued with humor and irony, but also, and more importantly, to continue to profess his very own truths about religion…
From the first uses of collage…
Maurice’s first drawings—or at least those that have been preserved—already betray the use of collage, closely associated with that of photocopies. Like all inventors, Maurice filled in forms to register his designs with the INPI (National Institute of Intellectual Property), and it is probably while completing these tedious applications that he discovered the fabulous abilities of photocopiers: reproducibility, but also enlargement and reduction in size. This gave him the idea to exploit these possibilities in his drawings, in which he uses recurring patterns reproduced by the machine. He either uses the photocopied page as a background for a new drawing, or cuts out the elements he is interested in to paste them onto new sheets of paper for new plans.
Among the patterns, one notices the insistent presence of a coin—a motif that is anything but trivial for someone who has lived on the street for more than thirty years. But from an artistic point of view, this little worthless coin, photocopied and glued onto an original drawing, somewhat ironically poses the question of the value of art. Still, Maurice seems to dismiss the difference between original and photocopy, considering himself more as an inventor on a mission than as an artist. Moreover, it is a British coin with the effigy of the Queen of England, which also makes sense in a more “biographical” way. Indeed, the British flag also appears frequently in Maurice’s work, whether drawn by himself or taken from a publication to be photocopied, cut out, and pasted. One is tempted to relate these motifs to a crucial moment in the life of the author, who claims that a long time ago his wife left him to live in England with their child.
Another collage shows the logo designed by Maurice. It represents the planet and is stamped “KARIBI CENTER DIFFUSION,” the name of the international company invented by the artist, who seems to reminisce his native Caribbean. In fact, Gauthier had offered the artist to have a stamp made to authenticate his photocopies. But while the gallerist was still wondering if this was a good idea after all, Maurice went ahead and designed a logo. The stamp that was finally produced, bearing a phrase obviously invented by the artist—literally, “Seen for equalization. Material of expertise”—was in turn integrated in most of his compositions. Maurice’s oeuvre develops with the coherence of a small fictional company!
When Maurice started to be represented by a gallery, he naturally began to think about “communication” and merchandising. At the end of 2018, as Christmas approached, he put up for sale his handmade calendars. For these, he used a small calendar that he photocopied and pasted on colored card stock. Each calendar was personalized with other collages consisting of Maurice’s own drawings. They represent machines he invented and images that belong to his iconographic vocabulary, including characters freely inspired by the 1960s comic-book series Nevada—a kind of western from which Maurice borrows little stories that amuse him, but have nothing to do with the original scenario. This experience nevertheless shows that collage allows Maurice to synthesize his favorite subjects.
…to the great Surrealist riddles
It goes without saying that Maurice’s work evolves according to the context in which it is made. In spring 2017, Maurice was hosted by a graphic designer who allowed him to explore new tools and mediums. Among other things, he appropriated a ream of A3 paper and began drawing on larger formats. And he launched into the practice of collage, something his life on the street had materially prevented him from doing. The cut-and-pasted motifs have grown and diversified, but without departing from his personal iconography.
While these works remain hybrid, merging drawing and collage, the predominance of cut-and-pasted elements allows us to call them “collages.” Although Maurice is not at all interested in the history of art or what other artists have done before him, his practice of collage perpetuates the Dadaist and Surrealist tradition of political demands, provocation, subversion, and black humor. Maurice’s collages are not saturated with superimposed images, as in the Dadaists’ works shouting out their disgust for the world at war. Rather, they are invested with a transmitting function, like nearly all of his drawings, but in the form of semantic riddles.
Each image, though autonomous, seems charged with its own symbolism and resonates by association with the other images pasted onto the paper in disparate arrangements. His subjects are mainly religious or esoteric, his images referring to episodes of the Bible and ritual accessories. But the links that Maurice establishes among these images enable him to develop a personal interpretation, which he connects to his own world by adding drawings of his inventions or from his Nevada repertoire, for example, but also photographs of his niece and himself.
Maurice himself appears in several of his collages, carrying an air of glorious, ironic and derisory mastery: wearing a British police helmet, casually leaning on two stacked coffins, smoking a joint in front of an open coffin… The black humor that permeates these works, including those in which he appears himself, are gearing Maurice’s iconography towards a scathing critique of our world or our understanding of the world.
It is not surprising that Maurice should have adopted collage so easily: after all, the Surrealists adored it because it allowed them to develop their work by following the images and associations emerging from their subconscious. And Maurice is unbeatable when it comes to associations of ideas: his comments on his creations resemble a frantic play with words, mixing religious texts, linguistic puns, funny stories, song lines, etc. The possibilities of interpretation are boundless, so suffice to say that his collages materialize the singular poems playing in the mind of their author.
Céline Delavaux, septembre 2019 — English version