Florent
Historique Sotteville les Rouen dans la bataille du rail 1940-44
Florent, "Historique Sotteville les Rouen dans la bataille du rail 1940-44", undated, lead pencil and watercolour on paper, 29,5, 18,5 cm, © photo credit Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
Author
Florent ,
(1885 – 1955), France
Biography
Florentin Constant, called Florent (1885– 1955), came from a farming family in Seine-Maritime, France. He worked at a series of jobs — as a grocer and a lemonade seller, a charcoal burner, a farmer, and an employee in a transport firm. At fifty, after a road accident, he spent sixteen years in a psychiatric hospital. He was then transferred to a hospice, where he died six years later. His drawings and a „collection of minerals“ were discovered in a large locked suitcase that he kept with him at all times, showing nobody its contents.
Florent’s drawings reveal his interest in a wide range of fields: mechanics, town planning, chemistry, physics, and alchemy, which he read about extensively. He marshalled this knowledge for his creations, which look like fantastic architectures, plans for renovations of buildings, or diagrams of imaginary machines. His drawings are completed with chemical formulas, expressed in such captions as ‘the unitary theory of sidereal architecture’, or ‘farmhouse in the anti-atomic polygon’; sometimes they take the form of estimates complete with prices.
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