Janko Domšić arrived in France in the 1930s. What little is known about him indicates that he received a basic education, experienced imprisonment, lived in Toul, and worked on railway construction. In Paris, he lived in poverty, occupying a small corridor in a modest building near Place de Clichy.
His drawings, made with colored pencil, ballpoint pen, and felt-tip pen, combine geometricized figures with texts in French, Croatian, and German. These texts list fragments of his life, incorporate excerpts from politics songs, and focus centrally on God. His lexicon references mystical ideas, the moral code of Freemasonry, as well as politics and economics. Strong graphic symbols—the pentagram, swastika, dollar sign, Soviet hammer and sickle, or Orthodox cross—radiate from the heavens, structuring a deliberately coded and enigmatic work. This body of work was discovered in 1978 by Alain Bourbonnais. Jean Dubuffet, to whom Bourbonnais showed the drawings, was deeply impressed by their quality. Domšić had hidden about thirty of his finest drawings, including four large-scale pieces. Upon his death, the building’s caretaker discarded them onto the street, but a neighbor rescued them and in 2004 donated them to the Decharme collection.