Roland Wilkie
| 'The
tragic results of a childhood destroyed are revealed even more disturbingly
in the world created by the Canadian outsider Roland Claude Wilkie
b.1939). Suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and, from 1995, a patient
at a hospital in Quebec City, Wilkie lost his father at the age of
two and his sister shortly after and was allegedly abused as a child.
He developed violent and paedophilic impulses towards children, particularly
blond girls, which have been sublimated since his voluntary admission
to the hospital in the obessive creation of images and text - he is
writing a secret autobiography entitled 'Fearless Water' - that are
unremittingly brutal. Where Darger wrestled constantly with destructive
impulses and the search for deliverance, in Wilkie's universe there
is only torture. His drawings of children or of himself, armed and
with murderous intent, are all the more disturbing for awkward child-like
style in which they are executed. He refuses drug treatment for his
condition that exposes him to the full force of a delusional world
in which the impulse to inflict physical and sexual harm is uppermost.
There is nothing to be celebrated in these drawings, but they are
important uncoverings of a most chilling potentiality of the human
psyche'.
(Colin Rhodes.
'Outsider Art : Spontaneous Alternatives', published by Thames &
Hudson.) All the above paintings have been exhibited at the American Visionary Art Museum. |
For further information and a list of works currently available |
