André MARTEL dit Le Martélandre papapafol du P (1893-1976) E Toça ce tamoi? Mixed media and collage on paper. On the back, a letter addressed to Dr. Gaston Ferdière. 20 x 28.5 cm Provenance : Collection Jean-Jacques Plaisance, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris. André Martel invented the Paralloïdre in 1949 as a way of reenchanting his writing. Martel used it to write poems, but also in his correspondence, and even in his personal writings. "With my paralloïdre hammer, I smashed everything in dictionaries, which seemed to me like ossuaries, and in grammars, where I saw instruments of torture. And when, to judge my fine work as an iconoclast, I looked at these debris of language (syllabic sections, pieces of prefixes, suffixes, bits of roots, fragments of vowels, consonants, phonemes of all kinds), oh marvels that the shock had separated from their rigid attachments and freed from their petrified gangue! I discovered, what a joy! all the raw materials in the native state of the human soul. " André Martel, "Le Paralloïdre", in Bizarre, no IV, April 1956, p. 121 (source: www.andre-martel.com).