The 1930s, which marked the spread of the first wave of surrealism, saw the emergence of a large number of artistic vocations that were more or less inspired by surrealism. These were generally painters deeply immersed in poetry who shunned the stylizations and deformations of cubism and «Picassism». While they appreciated unusual anecdotes, they intended to treat them calmly, using all the classical resources of drawing and material. Some of these painters—such as Lucien Coutaud, Pierre Ino, and Jean Marembert—had varying degrees of success in their careers; others—like Paresce, Olson, and Lafon—were less fortunate. It would be greatly unjust to overlook these great imagers or minor masters who refined surrealist painting by giving it a plastic meaning, linking it to a fantastical tradition that is both constant and deep (from Bosch to Odilon Redon, including Piranesi, Füssli, Bresdin, and Doré), and ultimately popularizing it.
Louis Cattiaux (1904-1953) belongs to that generation of painters overshadowed by the success of non-figurative, raw, gestural, tachist art, etc. A comprehensive exhibition of his works, organized in Valenciennes, his hometown, by the insightful Claude Souviron, curator of the municipal museum, has just marked the tenth anniversary of his brutal and premature death. This is the beginning of a reparation that a broader retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris would undoubtedly make more striking.
Cattiaux, who was part of the «Sagesse» group led by Fernand Marc, later founded «Transhylism» with his fellow painters already mentioned and the support of Jules Supervielle. He quickly engaged in personal research under the dual signs of occultism and poetry. Bernard Dorival stated in his presentation of the Valenciennes exhibition, through which Cattiaux joined his illustrious fellow townsmen Watteau and Carpeaux, that Walt Disney, Douanier Rousseau, popular art, surrealism, La Fontaine, and the Gnostics converge in this singular art. This is true, but it is essential to emphasize, above all, the magical and sumptuous character, eminently plastic in nature, of the vitrified, enameled canvases, where a mysterious «medium» intervenes, drawn from an inner folklore where «The Sleeping Beauty »rubs shoulders with «La Belle Ferronnière», where the Virgin leans over the alchemist’s retorts, and where Christ opens his entrails onto the philosopher’s stone.
This note on Louis Cattiaux would be incomplete if I did not mention that he was a friend of René Guénon and Lanza del Vasto, that he is the author of a sort of gospel, The Rediscovered Message, with a strange spiritual coloring, and finally of two collections of poems, one of which, The Poems of the Idler, features this apocryphal epigraph from Hippocrates: «Too many people write who have dirty nails».
