Apallec’s biography

First period 1914/1920

Birth in Normandy in 1896 – Death ?

1914 : At the age of 16, and in the general euphoria due to the declaration of war, he’s eager to serve his country, but an administrative mistake declares him unfit for service…
So if he can’t fight, he can still be useful to the war effort and thus wipe clean the humiliation. He decides to become a nurse student in Rouen and faithfully follows the heroic actions of his fellow countrymen in the magazines he collects.

But one does not become a nurse out of patriotism…
There starts depression..absinthe, calva, rum ….he will not pass his exam…

June 1916 : He returns to his parents’ place at Bolbec. When at his lowest point, a licensed nurse comrade pays him a visit ; the youth is scared as he’s just being sent to work in a country hospital a few miles away from the war front. He doesn’t want to go and proposes René to take his place and fight under his name…

René accepts immediately and becomes Ernest M. ; his first forged identity…Just a little bit later the young man will commit suicide by throwing himself from a cliff near Yport, only leaving what’s left of his honor into the hands of René; well..let’s say Ernest now…

1917 : Things go rather well for René in his first months there; he assists surgeons and other specialists with great enthusiasm. The war is raging more and more and the technology advances as well as other deadly inventions cause new kinds of injuries, more modern ones …
Nurses are overworked, René takes back to absinthe but he had not foreseen this nightmarish plight …
Back there, the war looks beautiful in the newspapers and magazines.

During a delicate operation he is noticed for his skill with a scalpel despite the death of the patient not long after the operation. He is then sent to the department of intensive plastic surgery care where he has to rebuild, remodel and rearrange faces before they return home, and he drinks more and more…

1918 : As a deserter he disappears 3 weeks before the end of the war..He goes back to his place where he takes his original identity back. He is ravaged by the visions of horror he attended for 2 years.

He can no longer sleep and remains secluded in his parents’ house. He keeps on using his scalpel and tools relying on his family encyclopedia and dictionaries, yet he’s deeply depressed.
Period of creation of the series entitled Mythologie Oisive (a pun mixing the sound of oiseaux(birds) and oisive (idle) )

1920 : In a moment of pure madness provoked by his favorite poison, he starts cutting into pieces and tearing off all his collected archives made of war fanaticism…
In this turmoil of paperwork the upside down pictures intermingle and catch his attention..

In a few scalpel slices, the face of an awarded general is broken apart beyond recognition and ridiculed..
His revenge is at hand..He greatly reduces his alcohol consumption and creates the series of the Gueules Cassées (Broken faces)

This series illustrates his resurrection through operating ! Even though the scalpel only glides on paper, the pleasure of sinuating along curves is indescribable.
He is building his own future plundering and destroying the past…