August 06, 2018

Jean-Luc Guillou, La vie en rose / Life in pink


pictures are screen prints from the video 
by Serflac (see documentation) 

Above house, exuberantly decorated in various ways, is located along the D787 departmental road in Brittany, France, near la Villeneuve (a community of Calac).

Life and works

This art environment has been created by Jean-Luc Guillou, about whom no biographic information is available, except that his job involves making music at regional markets with a classical street organ (a Limonaire).


Judging by the colorful decorations and the accompanying texts Guillou could be a lively person. The recommendation in above picture says Vie donc joyeux. Qu'importe l'avenir. Rève (Live happily. What does the future matter. Dream).

And a decorated cabin around the house is referred to as La vie en rose (Life in pink),  what could be a suitable name of this to my knowledge nameless art environment.


The decorations have been added to the walls by paint and they may represent flowers or all kinds of small motifs. Attached to the walls there are also various smaller items, such as jars, moons, faces, washers, usually vividly colored.

Apart from the decorations and texts on the walls, Guillou has been making various constructions from metal items such as old oil drums, drain pipes and garden tools, which depict a light house, a play set or a funny character. as in the picture below.


Facing Guillou's house, on the other side of the road, there is a topiary hedge in the form of two large snake-like creatures that look at each other, as in the picture below.

Compared with the way in which the house is decorated, the making of such a topiary seems to be of a quite different nature. so it's not obvious that Guillou is it's author. The internet does not provide any information about this.


Documentation
* Entry (September 2015) on Sophie Lepetit's weblog
* fragment about the site on the North France trip video by Serflac (YouTube, starts at 19.36, cannot be embedded here

Jean-Luc Guillou
"La vie en rose"
Callac, dept Côtes d'Armor, region Brittany, France
can be seen from the street 
(along departmental road D787 at the exit to La Villeneuve)

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