Guided by colours
Gary Cummiskey speaks to Robert Roman about Pascal Ulrich
See Pascal Ulrich's art here
Artist and poet Pascal Ulrich was born in Strasbourg in 1964. He started writing poetry at the age of 16 and at 23 he created a small poetry magazine called Dada 64. When he was 25, after a suicide attempt and time spent in a psychiatric hospital, he was given a disability pension and was thereafter able to devote himself to writing and art. Having battled with depression and alcohol problems throughout his life, Ulrich committed suicide in 2009.
Robert Roman is a poet and artist who befriended Ulrich in 1994. After Ulrich’s death he published a biography of him, The Lucid Dreamer, plus several collections of Ulrich’s poems and drawings. In 2014 he formed the BAKOU 98 association to preserve Ulrich’s work. He also created a blog devoted to Ulrich’s poetry, art and life.
When and how did you meet Pascal Ulrich? Had you been aware of his art or poetry before you met him?
Pascal Ulrich wrote me a first letter on June 16, 1994. I received it two days later, directly at my workplace. The letter came with a collage. In his letter, Pascal explained to me that he was contacting me following a request from Patrick Oustric, with whom he had been corresponding for several years. And it turns out that this Patrick Oustric, poet, and great lover of ancient letters, was one of my work colleagues! At that time I had not heard of Pascal Ulrich. I responded very quickly and that’s how our friendship began. We corresponded for fifteen years at the rate of at least one letter per week and we met eight times in Toulouse and once in Strasbourg.
Pascal’s art consisted of ink drawings, mail art, acrylic paintings, murals, and objects. Which did he prefer? I have seen only one or two collages of his – did collage not interest him?
His art has been guided above all by constant evolution and inspiration throughout his experiences and discoveries in his life as a man and as an artist. At first, it was just felt-tip pen drawings on simple sheets of paper or gouache paintings on Canson paper. Then in 1996, he started decorating his envelopes. His first attempts were clumsy because Pascal did not know how to draw. From 1997 his drawings with coloured markers became more beautiful and that is when he found his own style : shapes that snake around multiple heads. This is how his Postal Art began, which he then spread throughout the world.
Pascal was interested in collage, but to my knowledge he practiced this art very little.
During the summer of 1998, with the multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, on the French/German border, with a German metal sculptor, he discovered acrylic painting and, on this occasion, took the pseudonym Bakou.
But ultimately it was the technique of coloured felt-tip pens with which he felt truly comfortable. It prevailed through all of his work because Pascal had an innate sense for playing with colours, whether on envelopes or on sheets of different formats.
Pascal’s work could be classified as Art Brut. Did his consider his work as such, or did he not like his work being categorised?
Yes, I think that we can describe Pascal’s work as Art Brut Art even if he himself never formulated it that way. Pascal rejected many things : society, family, traditions, having children, celebrating Christmas or birthdays and even the constraints of art galleries. He refused to obey certain rules and therefore he did not appreciate being able to put a label on his back.
His art is figurative – it is always figures – not scenes or landscapes or still life. In that way his work reminds me of Gaston Chaissac – was he influenced by Chaissac at all?
Like Chaissac, Pascal was an autodidact. He had found his style on his own, even if Chaissac had been influenced by Picasso. I think that Pascal was not indifferent to the work of Chaissac, but he also loved Edvard Munch and Hans Arp, whose drawn shapes and colours can also be found in Pascal's drawings.
It seems Pascal did not give titles to his work – is that correct?
On several occasions Pascal gave a title to a drawing or painting, but he wrote the title directly on the work. He also sometimes did it on the envelopes he decorated. In general, though, it was more of a phrase or a sentence than a real title. But he rarely did this throughout his work.
Pascal was also a very prolific poet. I believe Bukowski was a big influence. What poets did he enjoy reading?
Pascal drew more than he wrote and perhaps his major fault as a poet was that he was satisfied with the first draft. In fact, Pascal rarely reworked his texts. He read a lot and Bukowski was in his library but he also appreciated Jules Mougin with whom he corresponded for some time, also Armand Olivennes, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Henri Michaux, Allen Ginsberg, Benjamin Péret, Baudelaire, etc.
Pascal was also a publisher, issuing small press books of his own work and others. I am interested in the small poetry journal he started in the late 1980s called Dada 64. Could you tell us something about his publications?
Indeed, in 1987, Pascal published Dada 64, a small poetry magazine, put together by himself and which ran for three issues. Inside, you can find his texts or drawings but also those of Marc Syren, Jacques Lucchesi, Gaston Criel, Marjan or Jacques Canut. Subsequently, with Dada 64 editions, he also published several poetry booklets.
In 1991 he created Absurde Crépuscule and self-published three booklets.
In 1992, Pascal invented L’ours qui parle (The Talking Bear), a simple sheet, single-sided, A4 format and photocopied, distributed by post and each time containing two or three poems of his own.
In 1996 he reintroduced Absurde Crépuscule. This poetic entity was a publishing house until 1998, then a poetry magazine of the same name from 1997, which stopped after three issues.
Finally, at the beginning of 2008, he published Epitaphes, a series of 105 aphorisms and the final collection at Absurde Crépuscule.
Pascal also loved music, ranging from classical to rock. He was a great lover of bands such as Soft Machine and musicians such as Nick Drake. In one of his final letters, to Bruno Sourdin, he chatted about Syd Barrett. Did he listen to music while he worked? Did he find it inspirational?
Pascal was an insomniac. In the evening, while his partner slept, he listened to all kinds of music while writing letters or decorating envelopes. This could last most of the night, but he always got up quite early. Pascal had great sensitivity and the music he listened to for hours guided his hand on the paper.
At one point Pascal was trying to create an arts centre, similar to Warhol’s Factory, but it collapsed. What happened?
The multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, in Germany, from July to December 1998, was a great artistic and human experience for Pascal, a great expectation but also a great disappointment. I never knew the end of the story but according to his letters of December 1998 and January 1999, his “associate”, the German metal sculptor, turned out to be a complete bastard. Pascal, being wholly uncompromising and libertarian, could not bear it and therefore immediately abandoned six months of work and hope.
Pascal did manage to have a few exhibitions outside France – how did those come about?
Pascal exhibited in Cuba, Great Britain, Mexico, Germany, and Brazil, between 1996 and 1999. Apart from the Kehl exhibition in December 1998, where he was present, Pascal never visited the countries where he exhibited. In fact, I know very little about these exhibitions. Concerning the exhibition in Mexico in 1998, I think he was able to participate thanks to Ana, a Mexican violinist friend whom he had met in Strasbourg at the end of 1997 and who had to take some works with her in her suitcase. For the rest, I imagine that his epistolary relationships and the numerous contacts with foreign artists, authors and publishers made his participation in these exhibitions possible.
Pascal had an alcohol problem throughout his life. It started when he was a teenager and towards the end of his short life he started drinking again, and could become violent when drunk. But how was he like when he was sober?
When I met Pascal for the first time in August 1997, he no longer drank a drop of alcohol following acute pancreatitis contracted in October of the previous year. We then saw each other eight times, and apart from his last visit in May 2008, which ended badly because he was drunk, I was lucky to only know him completely sober. So, most of the time I knew an intelligent, charming, calm, and generous man, curious about everything, mischievous and who had a lot of humour.
Since Pascal died, you have been trying to get art museums to take his work, but this has not been successful. Why are museums not interested in his work?
In 2014, I created the BAKOU 98 association whose goal is to make Pascal’s written and pictorial work known and continue. The association’s first action was to try to respect Pascal’s last wishes. Indeed, in his will, he wanted his drawings, paintings, and sculptures to be donated to the city of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, after months of procedures and discussions with the City Hall, they were not willing to take the Ulrich archive. The reasons given by the cultural director were that it was impossible to follow up on our proposal given the orientations of the municipal collections and the numerous requests made to the city museums.
Following this first failure, the association contacted various museums presenting Art Brut. The first was La Collection de l’Art Brut de Lausanne in Switzerland, which very quickly declined our proposal, citing a restricted budget and a limitation of their reserve spaces, forcing them to be very selective regarding the acquisition of new pieces. Second failure.
Subsequently, La Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris informed me that it could not accept our donation because it did not have a collection (?). The Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles tells me that it will close its doors for work for at least four years. The Musée d’Art Brut de Montpellier told me that it is in demand from all sides and that due to lack of space it cannot consider the offers proposed to it. However, two years later, the museum accepted a donation of envelopes decorated by Pascal, which they would eventually present during a Postal Art exhibition. That’s it! Pascal Ulrich entered a museum through his Postal Art, but won't his envelopes stay at the bottom of a drawer ?
All the other museums contacted in France: La Fabuloserie in Dicy, the Musée Art et Déchirure in Rouen, the LAM near Lille, the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse and the MIAM in Sète, none of which responded to my emails and messages reminders.
You have published a few books of Pascal’s work posthumously. Could you tell us something about it, plus the biography of him that you published?
The first book that I published in my small poetry editions, five years after Pascal's death, was a 360-page colour book dedicated to the man, the poet, and the artist that he was. This biography was published in October 2014 and is entitled Pascal Ulrich – The lucid dreamer. We can follow his entire journey from his birth to his death and beyond. The book is embellished with numerous poems, letters, photos, drawings, and paintings, as well as testimonies from people who knew him.
Five other books were then published between 2015 and 2022. The first four were collections of poems and aphorisms written by Pascal in 1992, 1995, 1996, 2006 and 2007, in which urgency, dazzlement, despair, revolt and death coexist, but also passion and love.
The latest collection contains only a series of black and white drawings executed with a felt-tip pen in 2004.
I am a frozen shadow
whose charm is in the fruit
of the melancholy twilight
*
Hello, what a pleasure
Goodbye, what a relief
Farewell, what a fatality
Pascal Ulrich, 1964―2009