“For him, existence or nonexistence, identity, and society are nothing more than an illusion. Only the sexual drive is real, and it needs not be tempered by any filter, for it is unique and all-powerful. Molinier is one of the few people I know who was so joyful that he managed to transform his own suicide into a playful act, announcing the date as if it were a rendezvous with himself, life, death, birth, and pleasure—all in one. And images to top it all off. ”
Gaspar Noé, in the exhibition text “Pierre Molinier: Fetishism,” Galerie Christophe Gaillard, 2018.
Pierre Molinier was born in Agen in April 1900. Until the age of 50, he worked in Bordeaux as a house painter, like his father. In his youth, he painted portraits and landscapes in a Post-Impressionist style. He exhibited regularly and helped found a salon for Bordeaux-based independent artists in 1928. His father committed suicide in 1944. In the 1940s, his painting evolved toward esotericism. He painted his first erotic work in 1948 and, in 1951, Le Grand Combat, which depicts contorted bodies and intertwined limbs. Deemed indecent, the painting was covered during the exhibition and became, for Molinier, the catalyst for a dramatic break with Bordeaux society. In 1955, he began an intense correspondence with André Breton, who exhibited his works the following year at the À l’Étoile scellée gallery in Paris. Molinier even contributed to several issues of the journal Le Surréalisme, même. In the 1960s, alongside his painting, he developed his photographic practice—focused on autoeroticism and androgyny—which he had begun in the mid-1950s through self-portraits and photomontages, created in the privacy of his Bordeaux apartment. He collaborated with Emmanuelle Arsan, whom he considered his female counterpart, and Haenel Koeck, who was close to the Viennese Actionists. In 1969, the photo book Molinier was published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. In 1975, he produced a series of photographs with Luciano Castelli. His son died that same year. Pierre Molinier took his own life in Bordeaux in March 1976. A true artistic testament, Le Chaman et ses créatures (1995)—a work to which he devoted twenty years—brings together drawings, paintings, and photomontages.