Pierre Albasser was born December 23, 1936 in Mulhouse, Upper Rhine, the eldest of four children of a worker. He became a civil engineer, married in Düsseldorf, where a daughter was born, then the family lived in Rio de Janeiro, Strasbourg and Versailles. As CEO of a large company, he began to scribble on post-it * for meetings and phone calls, went into early retirement in 1992 and was now encouraged by his wife. Pierre Albasser lives with his wife in Marsilly, a pretty village not far from the coast, where they feel very comfortable. He draws daily on the back of everyday packaging. This leads to a variety of formats and unexpected shapes of the work surfaces. He drew streaks and hatching of human or animal shapes with a ballpoint pen. What he finds, pens, markers, pastels, watercolors, empty printer cartridges enrich his work: scratches, stains, streaks or dabs of color complete his little lines. His work is intended exclusively for his wife Gudrun, as the preferred expert for his work, she has the role of his curator and he thinks he will no longer draw if she is gone one day.

My wife and I visited Pierre and Gudrun Albasser last october in Marsilly and we spent a wonderful weekend with them. What a great privilege to become vitness of a demonstration of the working technique of Pierre. The top at the left shows the opened drawer of the table where he works, he keeps several unfinished artworks still undergoing modifications during the week and at the end of the week only, his wife Gudrun would see his weekly production for the first time. At the right side Pierre demonstrated how to drawing with ink of ball point pencils: removing the front part transforms them to a compleately different tool drawing characdteristic large, slightly lines with uneven edges.