The estate of Janine Mongillat
The Raza Foundation-Gorbio is also in charge of the succession of Janine Mongillat (1930- 2002). In Edmond Heuzé's studio, Raza meets Mongillat, also a student of the National School of Fine Arts in Paris and marries her in 1959. Janine Mongillat follows her own artistic road which is in a permanent dialogue with Raza's conception and artworks. Through her works, she forms her own obscure poetic universe, a mythical personal universe which awakes a nightmarish sensuality and an elegiac primitivism. A transcendent and transformative power is revealed by responding to an abstraction of "art brut", defined as a "creative activity of mediums, visionaries, enlightened people, therefore an expression of extreme impulses, which can go as far as hallucination or delirium"1 . In her sculptures and collages, Mongillat has succeeded in extracting the most unexpected and original effects from the most diverse materials brought together by color. She combines separate elements of all kinds, such as pieces of newspaper, wood shavings, kraft paper, used tea bags, jute, cord, metal and various objects like toys’ fragments.
1 Danchin Laurent, « Art Brut et compagnie », Éditions de la Différence, Paris, 1995.
