Jean-Marie Massou (1950-2020) was a figure of "
art brut", defined in its strictest sense, who lived for 45 years in the forest of Marminiac in the Lot (France). In the 1970s, a mother refused to allow her son, a psychotic, illiterate and lonely young man, to be institutionalized. She offered him a forest of chestnut trees. There, Jean-Marie Massou will create, alone, a staggering world-work: hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of engraved stones, tons of rubble moved to dig kilometers of underground galleries, wells, an abyss, a pyramid, as traces of his universal mission. Massou, found lifeless on the ground in his house in the middle of the woods on May 28, 2020, at the age of 70, had been the subject of a remarkable documentary directed by the artist Antoine Boutet in 2009.
