Perdrizet, Jean
France, 1907 - 1975
Trained as an engineer, Perdrizet spent several years working for the Électricité de France. After being laid off in 1939 for poor health, he performed odd jobs in electrical work and industrial design. Having never married, he lived with his parents, who settled in Digne (France) in 1955. “The Inventor”, as he was called, manufactured machines in his basement, showed his plans to teachers and distributed his inventions to different universities, the CNRS, NASA and the Vatican, in the hope of being awarded a Nobel Prize. His drawings reveal ingenious electrical devices with mathematical formulas, verbal explanations and metaphysical signs, all in an imaginative rage of materialization and concretion. Perdrizet also created a universal language, Esperanto Sidereal, “the language of robotic astronauts”. He died in 1975, three days after his mother’s passing. Although the machines he built did not survive, we can still admire his plans, those precious and inexhaustible reservoirs of imagination which are major works of Art Brut.
