Just out from Ab irato, Un carnet d'excursion presents two collaborations between its three poet-artists: Jaques Abeille, and Anne-Marie and Jean-Pierre Guillon. The book opens with Abeille’s prose poem “Un carnet d’excursion” (“a travel notebook”) from the early 1970s accompanied by ink drawings by Anne-Marie Guillon from the same period. In the "Manuel de vitrier" (glazier's manual), Jacques Abeille and Jean-Pierre Guillon play a kind of telephone game in which one sends a drawing to the other to which the recipient replies with a drawing in turn and so on until they completed a suite of 14 pieces, a dialogue in images. [text in French]
Since little is available in English on the authors, below are a few notes:
Jacques Abeille introduced himself to the surrealist group in Paris through a response to the 1964 survey on erotic representations in La Brèche #7. In 1966, after meeting André and Georges Mimiague, he joined the brothers in founding the group Parapluycha in 1966 in Bourdeaux. He remained active after the dissolution of the Paris group, responding to Vincent Bounoure's 1969 enquête "Rien ou quoi?" and subsequently appearing in Gradiva, the Bulletin de Liaison Surréaliste (BLS), Surréalisme, Brumes Blondes, and Ce Qui Sera. His major work le Cycle des Contrées, a series of labyrinthine novels exploring imaginary lands, began with Le Jardin statuaire in 1982 and continued through seven more titles over the next 30 years. As Abeille notes, writing for him is a state of alienation that leads him by the thread of the pen. Alongside these works, Abeille published a number of erotic tales as Leo Berthe (who also appears as a character in the Cycle) and prior to that deployed Meville’s Bartleby as pseudonym for his poetic story La Crépusculaire (1971).
Anne-Marie Guillon created surrealist compositions in oils, ink, lace, and patterned seashells, appearing in the Bulletin de Liaison Surréaliste and elsewhere (four of which may be seen at the end of this post). Noting that while she admired the works of Toyen and Mimi Parent, Jean-Pierre wrote in BLS #9 that nothing was more pressing for her than to create A NEW POINT. She died in 1992.
In the early 1960s Jean-Pierre Guillon along with his friends Annie Le Brun and Hervé Delabarre contacted André Breton and the Paris group. Curiously like Abeille, he first published in La Brèche #7—a poem inspired by a phrase heard in a dream: “the men in the dream lived a hundred million years, each 20 years old: it was the wished-for age of Avalcanti during his 1629 voyage.” He continued to document his dream-life as poetic evidence, in 1996 gathering a selection in Les nuits du veilleur du nuit (“The nights of the night watchman”). After the dissolution of the Paris group, he aligned with Vincent Bounoure’s position, participating in BLS, Surréalisme, Phases, and later was regularly involved in S.U.R.R. At the same time he worked to save Maurice Fourré’s novels from oblivion (whose La nuit du Rose-Hôtel is a hermetic masterpiece) and with others founded L’Association des amis de Maurice Fourré. He also prized the paintings of Yves Tanguy to the point of translating Gordon Onslow Ford's essay "Yves Tanguy and Automatism" for publication in 2002 éditions de la Digitale. In 2011, a year before his death, Le Grognard gathered his biting, satirical polemics against public abuses of D.A.F. de Sade, André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and others in a convulsive issue well worth reading.
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Jacques Abeille's le Cycle des Contrees and other novels on fr.wikipedia.
Selected works by Jean-Pierre Guillon:
Château d’Os with collages by Albert Marencin (éditions Même et Autre, 1979)
Le Bourgeon-Corail, (chez l'auteur, 1981)
L’État second, (éditions du Fourneau, 1987)
Les nuits du veilleur de nuit, (La Maison de verre, 1996)
Le Grognard, #18, La Main dan le sac, (Éditions du Petit Pavé, 2011)
Anne-Marie Guillon's paintings and other works as published Bulletin de Liaison Surréaliste #9:
