From “little people” he made thousands of giants. For 40 years, the Brest painter Paul Bloas has pasted his immense figures across the four corners of the world, from the Atacama Desert (Chile) to the ruined buildings of Beirut, with a particular affection for manual workers.
Mounted on a stepladder, in the middle of the Recouvrance bridge in Brest, Paul Bloas covers with glue an enormous portrait of a red and blue boilermaker, which contrasts with the gray of the concrete. “Thank you for your work,” a passerby calls out to him. “It’s nice to brighten up the deck a little! I am part of the walls here,” comments the 62-year-old painter, well-trimmed goatee and cap on his bald head. “Generally, big guys are popular everywhere. Whether in Beirut, Brest, Taipei, where I stuck them… There was always a really warm welcome. They are quite reassuring characters because they are tall. But at the same time, they are very fragile since they are made of paper.”
It was under another bridge in the Breton city that its first giant was born, one day in June 1984. “We had to do it big to catch the eye of motorists,” says Paul Bloas. At the time, “figuration was very frowned upon,” remembers the man who was then a student at the Beaux-Arts. “We were nerdy, we didn’t understand anything.” Two years later, the young painter went into exile in Berlin, where he held his first exhibition, the catalog of which was prefaced by a certain Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
Back in Brest, he locked himself up for two months, alone, in the recently abandoned Pontaniou prison. A voluntary prisoner, “sleeping in a soaked sleeping bag”, he documents the prison world by sticking his paper figures on the cell walls.
Also read Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s “wall papers” speak to us
Portraits of Basque steelworkers in Bilbao, street urchins in Beirut in ruins after the civil war, the aftermath of the financial crisis in Lisbon, projects in Madagascar or Valparaiso… The painter counts 2,000 to 3,000 giants stuck all over the world in 40 years. Characters measuring 3.40 m – more than twice the height of their creator, 1.66 m -, who can be recognized by their vulnerable appearance despite their generous shapes.
“His painting is quite disturbing. It’s a bit like a cemetery for the living dead,” described writer Jean-Bernard Pouy in the documentary Zones d’ombres. The dark novel author, creator of the Le Poulpe series, worked with Bloas in 2007, around precariousness in Valenciennes (North). Son of a worker at the Brest Arsenal, having shared his childhood between Brittany and Madagascar, the painter says he likes to represent “the little people”, those “who work well with their hands”.
“He is fascinated by the working world, these people who get up every day and do not easy jobs,” confirms his guitarist friend Serge Teyssot-Gay, co-founder of the group Noir Désir, who describes “a huge hard worker,” “a solitary” who “speaks social and history before talking about painting”. Since 2010, the two artists have been performing Ligne de Front, a performance combining painting and guitar on stage. “What he does is very powerful, people are amazed, attracted to the painting like a magnet. They appropriate his work,” describes the guitarist, evoking the “mixture of friendship and admiration” that binds them.
The giants of Bloas appear particularly in places where we don’t expect them: industrial wastelands, ruins, desert… Even the wrecks of warships in the Landévennec marine cemetery, in the harbor of Brest. An episode which earned Brestois a summons to court, after a complaint from the French Navy for “deterioration of wrecks”. He got away with a simple reminder of the law. “I didn’t really want to be the Ernest Pinard of Brest,” says the prosecutor at the time Éric Mathais, in reference to the magistrate who prosecuted Baudelaire and Flaubert.
Of this episode, the magistrate also keeps the memory of a “beautiful meeting”. He left Brest after acquiring a work by Bloas, which still hangs in his office in Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis)…
