Pedro Cornas

Born 1893 in Brazil.

Pedro Cornas, of Spanish origin, worked as a printer before he began suffering from schizophrenia. He was confined to the psychiatric hospital of Juqueri, close to São Paulo, in 1932. There he began drawing. An artistic production which, according to him, was supposed to capture the complexity of cosmic and planetary systems. Today it is difficult to estimate the number of works Cornas produced - most of them have disappeared. 
In that period, the hospital of Juqueri was shaken up by the beneficial influence of the psychiatrist Osório Cesar, one of the first to consider "art of the insane" as purely aesthetic production and not simple documents of symptomatic value. 
The quality of Cornas’ works led Cesar to lend eleven drawings (the name is spelled "Cornas" and not "Comas" as in Robert Volmat’s book L’art psychopathologique) and another seventeen by Albino Braz, a patient of whom he was also in charge, for the International Exhibition of Psychopathological Art of 1950, organized by the French psychiatrist Robert Volmat.

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