AMEDRO gilles

1954 . calais . france

Gilles Amedro was preoccupied with mysticism and cosmic ideas; he was interested in aliens, complex mathematics and esoteric discoveries … Amedro was hospitalized for the first time in 1974. He enjoyed a privileged status in the hospital: he could move freely; he went regularly to his apartment 80 km from the hospital, walking, in an ambulance, hitchhiking or on a motorcycle, at any time of day or night. His artistic production can be divided into two types: technical drawings, based on graphs and diagrams among which there are UFOs and nuclear engine drawings — he regularly sent his technical plans to CNRS or Marcel Dassault; and portraits, drawn with both hands. However, the long years spent in the hospital gradually depleted his pictorial production. Finally, his work focused on the representation of four portraits: two men and, more rarely, two women. The most recurrent is the face of an old man with aristocratic features, a kind of mystical embodiment of absolute power. The other male character does not have the haughty serenity of the first; bearded, he watches the viewer with anxiety. Gradually, the drawings of Gilles Amedro became emptied, and only an outside shape of almost invisible contours remains.