Aloïse Corbaz

Private Collection

Private Collection

Jacqueline Porret-Forel, Chigny

Private Collection, France

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964), catalogue raisonné électronique, Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK-ISEA/Fondation Aloïse, no. 95440.01/02, illustrated in colour

Aloïse Corbaz’s Louis XIV – Ban de Lyigie created in 1949 unfolds as a dazzling and expansive composition in which fantasy, theatricality and feminine power converge. Across the surface, Corbaz orchestrates a vibrant chromatic field dominated by saturated reds, yellows and blues, structuring the composition around a monumental female bust placed before a radiant backdrop. Crowned with a halo-like coiffure and adorned with necklaces bearing miniature effigies, this central figure embodies the imperious, sensual heroines that define Corbaz’s visual universe. Around her, the image proliferates into a constellation of secondary scenes and figures: a dark-haired male profile rendered in thick, swirling pigment; a butterfly-bodied female figure; and a host of smaller, hieratic characters that populate the pictorial space. The composition resists linear narrative, instead unfolding as a simultaneity of visions, akin to an operatic stage in which multiple episodes of desire and encounter play out at once.

This work belongs to a rare group in which Corbaz employed gouache, applying colour in dense, unmodulated passages that heighten the material presence of the image. The intensity of the palette and the fluid, often uncontained outlines contribute to the sense of emotional excess and imaginative urgency that animates the drawing. Working on both sides of the paper and frequently expanding her compositions across large formats, Corbaz sought to give form to an inner world that exceeded conventional pictorial limits. Here, the interplay between decorative patterning, symbolic figuration and childlike stylisation produces a visual language that is at once naïve and profoundly sophisticated, oscillating between intimacy and grandiosity.

Institutionalised for much of her life following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Corbaz developed her practice within the asylum, where she constructed an extraordinary and deeply personal iconography. Her imagery, often centred on powerful, romanticised female figures and their admirers, draws on opera, historical fantasy and autobiographical projection. In Louis XIV – Ban de Lyigie, these elements coalesce into a richly layered vision in which historical reference dissolves into dreamlike invention. Championned by Jean Dubuffet as a key figure of Art Brut, Corbaz reveals here the full force of her imaginative world, where colour, ornament and figuration become the vehicles of an unrestrained, poetic and intensely affective expression.