Karl BEAUDELERE Hommage au Facteur Cheval
Karl BEAUDELERE
Born in Marseille, Karl Beaudelere has never disclosed his true identity or his year of birth. Since discovering Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1977, the artist, who is an adept of numerology and clairvoyance, claims to be in constant connection with the poet. Although his work mainly features self-portraits, Karl Beaudelere always appears masked. The self-taught artist says: “In the symbolic image of the mask I made and wear at my openings – an upside-down, embroidered Batman bonnet – I turned the destiny that promised me a life as a worker upside down to become an artist.” He made a name for himself in 2007 with the creation of various stencils. From 2011, he will draw self-portraits with a biro. Always starting with the drawing of an eye, the artist interweaves his strokes to form faces of great detail.
In 2017, an exhibition at the Espace Jean-Prouvé in Issoire showed his work. Some of his works are kept in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Western Art in Tucheng (China), as well as in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne (Switzerland). Karl Beaudelere is represented by the Galerie Hervé Courtaigne in Paris.
Hommage au Facteur Cheval 2015
It was at the opening of his first solo exhibition in 2015, Karl Beaudelere: Face à Face at the Galerie Hervé Courtaigne, that the artist met Marie-José Georges, then director of the Palais idéal du facteur Cheval. A week later, he visited the Palais, and, back home, he hurriedly produced three portraits. In the form of a constructed doodle, the Postman’s face takes shape. The gestures are ample and the line discontinuous. Reproduced on a sheet of notebook paper, the spiral spaces of which are still present, the postman with hollowed-out cheeks wears his kepi on his head. He is framed by a large number of writings. On the right-hand corner of the page is written: “Life is a swift steed. My thought will live with this rock”, which is a text by the facteur Cheval himself. Karl Beaudelere has also transcribed the poem Correspondances IV from Baudelaire’s collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal: “Nature is a temple where the living pillars sometimes let out confused words; Man passes through forests of symbols that observe him with familiar eyes. Like long echoes that from afar merge into a deep and dark unity, Vast as night and as light, Perfumes, colours and sounds answer each other. There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh, Sweet as oboes, green as meadows, – And others, corrupted, rich and triumphant, Having the expansion of infinite things, Like amber, musk, benzoin and incense, Which sing the transports of the spirit and the senses. “A text that may remind us of the tours of the postman, who, in building his palace, has well transcribed the transport of the spirit and the senses.