Of Spanish origin, Pedro Cornas, a printer by trade, was admitted in 1932 to the Juquerí psychiatric hospital near São Paulo, Brazil, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was there that he began producing a body of graphic work that, according to him, reflected the complexity of cosmic and planetary systems.
Combining imaginary and real topographies, his ink and pencil drawings reference Brazil, France, Lebanon, Poland, Spain, and Russia, as well as specific neighborhoods of São Paulo. Having studied music and the French language, he signed his works “Pedro Cornas o estudioso” (“Pedro Cornas the scholar”).
Since most of his works have disappeared, the full extent of his production remains unknown. The formal quality of Cornas’s drawings led the psychiatrist Osório Cesar—under whose progressive influence the hospital then operated—to send two of them to Jean Dubuffet, without revealing the artist’s name. In 1950, Cesar lent eleven of Cornas’s works to the Sainte-Anne Hospital for the International Exhibition of Psychopathological Art organized in Paris.