Gris 4, 1978

Fred Deux   Master Artists

Fred Deux, born July 1, 1924 in Boulogne-Billancourt1,2, and died September 9, 2015 in La Châtre, is a designer and writer (under the pen name Jean Douassot). He is occasionally a sculptor. In 1941-1943, Fred Deux was apprentice electrician at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (evening classes) while he worked during the day at the Farman factory in Suresnes as an electrician. In 1943, during the Occupation period, he was contacted by a group of FTP resistance fighters and joined the FTP guerrillas in Doubs. At the Liberation, unable to imagine a return to the factory, he enlisted in the French army within the Moroccan goums. Refusing to serve the post-war colonial policy, he obtained a reform in 1948. From 1948, in Marseille, he worked at the Clary bookstore, located rue Paradis, near the Place Estrangin-Pastré. He married one of the Clary sisters with whom he had two daughters born in 1949 and 1950, but he soon divorced. His activity at the bookstore introduced him to literature, the works of André Breton and the manifesto of surrealism. It follows then a long series of readings: Louis Aragon, Henry Miller, Sade, Franz Kafka… But he also discovers Paul Klee who will influence him. Fred Deux founded the surrealist subgroup of Marseille. He then began to make his first spots on paper with lacquer paint for a bicycle. The works of the first period (from 1949 to 1958), sometimes nicknamed the “kleepathologies”, are characterized by the predominance of spots that invade the surface of the paper, “spots” noticed by Karl Flinker. In 1951, settled in Paris, he met Cécile Reims who would become his wife. He met André Breton and frequented the surrealists, from whom he moved away in 1954. In 1953, the Le Fanal bookstore-gallery presented his first personal exhibition. In 1957, bedridden, Fred Deux wrote La Gana which he submitted to Maurice Nadeau: the book was published in 1958 under the pseudonym of Jean Douassot. This novel is the first of his largely autobiographical writings. In 1962, he also began recording his life story using a tape recorder. In 1963, he made his first pencil drawings on watercolor backgrounds: Les Otages. In 1966, Fred Deux began to take notes on the sheet that protected his current drawing. This text entry now becomes almost systematic and transcribes a word parallel to the work. This coexistence of writing and drawing, from 1977, finds its most complete form in "unique books" such as La Malemort (1980), La Matrice or La Règle. At the beginning of the 1980s, he produced large “Self-portraits” and “Passions” in pencil, which, from 1982, led him to large-format drawings populated by phantasmagoric beings, figures of the double, figures of others ( Processions of the existing ones, the Remz, the Alter ego). In 1985, Fred Deux and Cécile Reims moved to La Châtre, in Berry. In 1987, he produced La Vie m'agit, a unique book, a collection of 19 drawings enhanced with watercolor. In the 1990s, Fred Deux returned to color by creating large colored spots (watercolor, lacquer or paint) that he reworked with Indian ink or pencil. The forms proliferate autonomously, sometimes visceral. There a hand, a body, a face, an abandoned fetus appeared. Some of Fred Deux's works have been taken over and engraved on copper by Cécile Reims. In 1971, Fred Deux and Cécile Reims founded the contemporary art center of Lacoux (CACL), in the department of Ain. The CACL is located in a former disused town hall-school in the hamlet of Lacoux, located in the commune of Hauteville-Lompnes4. He died at the age of 91, in 2015, in La Châtre.