Born in 1929 in Paris, deceased in the same city in 1995, Gil Joseph Wolman is one of the major personality of the post-war avant-garde.
Lettrist poet in 1949, Wolman's "mégapneumies" theory (1951) extends Isidore Isou's lettrist theory, by dissociating the consonant and the vowel, to free the breath. In 1951, Wolman realized a movie, L'Anticoncept, in which he created a primary movement covering entirely the screen, constituted by a probe-baloon. The soundtrack is a long non-narrative poem interspersed by "mégapneumies", the new breath poetry.
Wolman left Isidore Isou's Lettrism in 1952 and created the International lettrist with Guy Debord. Excluded from the International Lettrist in 1957, Gil Joseph Wolman began in 1959 a new work more pictorial, including plastic materials, paper-maché, in which Wolman inscribed writings and graffitis.
With the Art Scotch began, in 1964, the most prolific period of Wolman's work. He used adhesive tape to tear from newspaper and magazines fragments of texts and images, which remained inscribed in the glue, glue which is fixed on diverse supports (wood, canvas).
The separation is one of the major themes of Wolman's last researches (Duhring Duhring, 1979).
Emmanuel Latreille.