Marminiac (France) (AFP)

For 45 years, a psychotic man, lonely and crude, has built a hollow world in a forest of chestnut trees in the Lot, carting stones, tirelessly digging underground passages to a phantasmagorical universe.

If art brut is often the work of spirits where madness and the tragic are transcended in a compulsive work, then the career of Jean-Marie Massou is a manifesto.

Massou died in May, at the age of 70, found face down in his hovel in the middle of the woods.

This massive, disturbing-looking man could have spent part of his life in a psychiatric hospital. But a handful of people, including his mother, took the trouble to listen to him, to give him the means to live free and to create.

"What grabbed me was the whole universe around him: his body, his creation, his determination", explains plastic artist Antoine Boutet, author in 2009 of a remarkable documentary on Massou, "Le plein pays".

In the foregrounds of this hypnotic film, we see a man with a disheveled hair walking with a massive step towards a hole covered with leaves. He slips in and gets swallowed through the cavity.

- "Wait for the aliens" -

Massou digs galleries, digs up gigantic stones that he aligns, erects pyramids or sculpts sphinxes.

He also makes collages and as he can neither read nor write, he fixes his "message" on cassettes, hundreds of cassettes.

On these magnetic tapes, he tells of the end of the world, overpopulation, ecological disaster, the white sun. It urges humanity not to reproduce any more and to wait for the extraterrestrials to go to "Sodorome", this paradise where children will no longer suffer.

Two divinities illuminate his eschatological story: Brigitte Bardot and Marie-Ange, "the count's daughter" whom he met in his childhood when his mother was working at the castle of Rubelles in Seine-et-Marne.

- A forest as a blank page -

In the 1970s, her mother decided to return to the Lot of her ancestors. She no longer wants her 20-year-old son to be interned in psychiatry.

She buys an old farm surrounded by a 5 hectare forest. A chestnut wood that will become the blank page on which Massou's work will be inscribed.

In 1997, "his mother told me on her deathbed: + it's not a bad boy +", says André Bargues, the former mayor of Marminiac, a Lot village of 360 souls between Bergerac and Cahors, which is like this became Massou's "protector" for nearly 20 years.

The former city councilor and the new mayor, Rachel French, now wish to promote the artist's heritage.

"It's hard to imagine that a man could have done all this alone," says André Bargues in the middle of the Massou forest in front of a stone door decorated with chalices and lilies. A "passage" which opens onto a deep fault covered with large stones.

- "Suffering from isolation" -

"There was in him a suffering of isolation. We saw him with the pleasure of the meeting", insists the documentary maker Antoine Boutet, who films him as closely as possible for a year and a half.

"He had a culture much more important than he could let appear", he underlines.

A few years later, in 2015 after seeing "Le plein pays", Olivier Brisson, from the label "Vert Pituite la belle" - an association which "defends singular musical practices" - also decides to go and meet him.

"He had a way of repeating sentences, he really had his own gimmicks," notes the producer. Massou entrusted him with some cassettes of his songs which would give birth to a first album in 2017, "Sodorome".

"At the end, he asserted himself. He managed to see the aesthetic side of his work," says Olivier Brisson. A few months before passing away, Massou, a cabotin, finally launched, "Of course that I am an artist".

© 2020 AFP