“He had created his own funerary monument at the bottom of the garden”: Olivier Brice, a strange character fascinated by death

Olivier Brice avec la maquette du trône du futur empereur Bokassa. MAXPPP – Keystone Pictures USA

L’éphémère propriétaire du château de Cambous, à Viols-en-Laval, dans l’Hérault, qui avait créé le trône de l’empereur Bokassa 1er, est toujours présent dans le village, à travers une statue aux airs d’hermaphrodite très particulière.

"They were very nice, and seemed very in love with each other. But they were still two very baroque characters" remembers Alain Plombat, former director of Midi Libre, and who discovered the story of this strange couple and their link with Bokassa in 1982, while he was producing a series of reports on the owners living in castles in Languedoc Roussillon.

Three different identities, as if to cover their tracks

Because Olivier Brice had rather played the card of discretion by settling in Hérault in 1978, after having been very exposed for his role in the pharaonic coronation of the dictator of ;Bangui. A behavior which he seemed to be accustomed to: he in fact played, depending on the circumstances, on three different identities, as if to cover his tracks.

One, that of civil status, was rather passed over in silence: Yves Moïse Asseraf was born in 1933 in Algiers, from a Moroccan Jewish family, and stopped studying at 17, before studying drawing and sculpture at the Beaux-Arts for seven years, without obtaining a diploma. The second, Michel Tellin, was that of the fashion designer he became, first in Algiers, with a rather upscale clientele and a boutique on rue Michelet, before successfully pursuing his career in Paris after the ;independence of Algeria in 1962.

The frozen agonies of Pompeii had marked him

There remains his third name, that of the artist, which has always been more or less criticized, between the recognition of certain critics and the condescending gaze of others. His creative process was particular: he collected casts of classical statues, which he cut out then covered with fabric, fragments of objects or materials, before casting new ones. bronzes or plasters. The whole thing gave stranger, quite morbid results, also evoking the frozen agony silhouettes of Pompeii, which had left their mark on him. "I am fascinated by death. Death is radiant" he used to explain, referring to the shocks of the Second World War, then the Algerian War.

"A reclining character, with an erect penis"

Alain Plombat kept a very clear memory of this funereal fascination, during his report in Cambous in 1982. "He had made his own funerary monument at the bottom of the garden , with a elongated character, with an erect penis, and which shone: seeing him caress it under the eye of his defrocked seminarian friend was a very astonishing moment, where we say to ourselves that ;rsquo;being a journalist, you still do an extraordinary job.

After fleeing the tax authorities and the Château de Cambous in 1985, Olivier Brice settled in Schaerbeek, in Belgium, after having undoubtedly hidden in Portugal, in another residence, the master paintings which he owned with his companion. He bequeathed the entirety of his works to this Belgian municipality, which in exchange was to dedicate a museum to him.

All his works are for sale on the internet

But the project did not come to fruition: he died in Paris on January 22, 1989, twenty-four hours before his friend Salvador Dali. His companion died in a Portuguese abbey in 1994. Jean-Bedel Bokassa died in the Central African Republic in 1996, after being sentenced to death during his exile, then amnestied, and was ;rehabilitated after his death in 2010.

There remains in Viols-en-Laval a posthumous trace of this strange artist who was Olivier Brice, today totally forgotten, and including the complete set of ;nbsp;remaining works are still for sale on the internet. His famous and sulphurous funerary statue, resembling a hermaphrodite, still rests at the foot today of the plaque serving as a monument to the dead in the village, as a final snub by the sculptor to this "radiant death" which fascinated him so much.

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