The first poems by Gisèle Prassinos date to the early 1930s, when, at barely fourteen, she tried her hand at automatic writing and was hailed as a prodigy by the Surrealists. Although she published several quasi-Surrealist works, she developed an eccentric language of her own. In the 1960s Prassinos’ literary work took on a mixed-media approach, adopting new tools of expression. The fullest example is Brelin le frou ou le Portrait de famille (1975), the illustrated story of an outlandish French family told by Brelin, the child of an odd but strict scientist named Berge Bergsky. Prassinos made twelve panels of brightly coloured fabric, machine-sewn and hand-finished, that reproduce the book’s black-and-white drawings. In Portrait de famille, Doctor Bergsky looms over the rest. Brelin, symmetrical to his father and looking contrite, seems like the only one attempting to challenge his authority. As we can also see from Portrait idéal de l’artiste, Brelin is a domestic hero who fights the patriarchal regime established by the head of the household. Prassinos definitively proves she no longer needs any unconscious automatism to tell her stories: the force driving her visions is, simply, the world as it is.
Stefano Mudu
