Peter Wood — Wikipedia

Peter Wood is an English surrealist, born in 1951 in Leeds and died the April 4, 1999 In Paris, poet, translator, designer and creator of collages and assemblies.

Having discovered surrealism thanks to the poet Joyce Mansour, he moved in 1976 in Paris, for him the surreal city par excellence, and binds with poets Marianne Van Hirtum, Jimmy Gladiator, Abdul Kader El-Janabi, but also with All those who refused the Schism of 1969 in French surrealism. He also maintains close links with Czech surrealists who experience a difficult underground in the context of Czechoslovakia subservient to the USSR. In 1979 he published the collection of poems Fuse of Babel, a ruby nemesis , illustrated by his own collages, those of Rattus and by drawings of Siegfried de Crescendo. He hosts the English language review The moment (4 numbers of June 1979 To April 1980 ), participate in the black rascal and camouflage, hosted by Jimmy Gladiator, in the libertarian desire and in Homnesia of Abdul Kader El-Janabi, as well as to English magazines Grid And Literature . In 1984 he created the Hourglass journal, coupled with an eponymous association which will organize several surrealist exhibitions (exhibition The beautiful to deliver , in 1986 at the Galerie l’Usine, mounted in collaboration with Bruno Montpied), and finally, still under the same name, a publishing house which will publish more than twenty plates until 1999. Let us point out a second collection of its poems in English, A nightshade (Hourglass, Paris, 1988), and an anthology of poetic and prose texts, published after his death, We shall strike for more dreams (Hourglass, Paris, 2000).

From a plastic point of view, the most significant contribution of Peter Wood to surrealism is made up of several series of assemblies gathered in boxes which are not without evoking those made once by Joseph Cornell, but distinguished by several points fundamentals. These boxes were executed from winter 1984-1985 and their realization was gradually improved over the years until around 1995, under difficult conditions due to material precariousness in which the creator lived most often. To carry out his assemblies, Peter Wood first used industrial packaging in polystyrene previously painted in black which he later inserted in wooden and glass stammers specially made for this purpose. To carry out his assemblies, Peter Wood placed around the receptacle that he had decided to fill a large number of recovery objects, most often picked up at the Montreuil flea market, without pre -established order. First motionless and immersing himself in a state close to hypnosis, he seized at random, without consciously pre-established intention, of some of the objects he posed justly in the box, before arranging them by Voluntarily limited adjustments and fix them using glue or staples at the black bottom of it. Thus he sought to limit the share due to his own will and to surrender to the largest part of possible automation. However, it can be objected that the initial choice of objects used was the result of subjective and reasoned work. It is clear that Peter Wood’s work is not entirely automatic, just as automatic poetry cannot be entirely from the moment it is the work of a subjective will and not that of a machine whose text production would be purely fortuitous. Peter Wood’s plastic vocabulary is that of desire, eroticism, relations between Eros and Thanatos. But the “plastic sense” of the assemblies is that which is imposed, fortuitously, by the chance stimulated in the abandonment which presides over their realization.