Patrick Henley 1959-2021 | At Henriette Valium

“I have always been alone, all alone,” says Patrick Henley, alias Henriette Valium, in a rare self-portrait written in 2020. It begins as soon as I am aware of myself and of others with the immense feeling of being an extra -earthly. What am I here to do? […] But what have I done in nothing to deserve such a reality? Why do I have to live if I have to die, die if I have to live and then, above all, who made me this sad joke? “

Henriette Valium, often referred to as “the pope of underground comics”, died at the end of the summer. Of natural death. In his studio and in his sleep, at 62 years old. The disappearance of this eternal “outsider” was highlighted very briefly in the media, while it was a shock to the whole community of artists and friends who knew him so well.

Her death really saddened me, because I ran into Henriette Valium at Cheval Blanc a few times and I remember the build of a wrestler, of a thunderous and sympathetic being, who never left the margin. . I knew a little about his work because my boyfriend became a fan of his comics when he was 12. “Where are my Valiums?” », He said before going to bed with his large-scale collections that we still have and which do not enter any library: 1000 Rectums, Primitive moron! and Mom’s heart. Collector’s items that he took years to create with a manic attention to detail.

To dive into Valium’s drawings is to dive into an infinite and hallucinatory vortex of dark humor and total freedom. Each board is the work of a monk. Those who have read his Nitnit, a major diversion of Hergé’s Tintin, cannot forget it. Valium did not want, like the Puritans, to burn Tintin, an influence of his childhood as for many; he wanted to “loosen it up”, which I find much more subversive.

A storm named Valium

Everyone crossed his line of pencil one day, because he designed a ton of posters for bands and shows that went through Electric Foufounes and other bars in the 1980s. He even founded a punk group called Valium and the depressive (we have a tape). The day before his death, he was in a rush for large magnificent paintings inspired by portraits of generals, civilian victims and prisoners of the two world wars. And of course, the symbol of the swastika, which he was obsessed with and wanted to pull from the clutches of the Nazi imagination, is everywhere.

My lover and I had the great privilege of visiting his workshop, a small garage in the Hochelaga district which turned out to be Ali Baba’s cave. I couldn’t get over it, because I didn’t think there were still such free and ingenious beings.

I politely asked to see this lair for his son, Olivier Henley, after reading his heartbreaking tribute to his father on Facebook: “My father was a complex, self-defining structure, an entity that synchronizes the temperament of life, of the existence in the manner of a laser, of a groove of a toune. […] Snuggled in his arms, he smelled of acrylic, coffee, pencil and a hint of swing. It smells so good, you have no idea. ”

We are received by Oliver and Silvia Gérome, spouse of Henriette Valium for the last few years. In fact, he and she fell in love with it in 1983 that lasted a few months. They never cut ties, got together from time to time, but it was the great revival for two or three years. Henriette Valium was the father of four children from three different spouses. “A lion, you don’t tie that up,” Silvia sums up, laughing. Me, I wanted babies, a boyfriend, and he wanted them all! “After a silence, she lets go, her throat tight:” You realize that life is easy when you’re with the right person. Silvia is the one who discovered Valium’s lifeless body in his workshop where he placed the padlock on the door so as to let it be known that he was at home. They had projects in their heads together.

Valium has never stopped having projects in their heads.

Create your world and your life

Henriette Valium’s workshop had also been her home for eight years, tell us Olivier and Silvia. Sorry ? He lived here even in winter with just a heater? We all have our coats on our backs! But the place is amazing. In this tiny garage where her artist’s table and paintings are throne in the center, Henriette Valium has arranged everything herself, you’d think you were in a painter’s room in Paris in the 1920s. He bizouned the plumbing and installed a bath, toilet, sink. On a mezzanine with a much too low ceiling, there is a bed – and it seems that he often banged his forehead when he woke up – as well as a small desk that was not possible: the corner is so cramped that Valium sawed off the floor. table and chair, and drilled two holes for his legs. Olivier takes out a pan lid with a crash, as his father did, who took up space, and shows us that it is a ceramic plate on which he has screwed a handle.

He didn’t have much choice, because the institutions didn’t really want his radical art, apart from the gallery owner Robert Poulin who took him under his wing. Henriette Valium moved into this garage, in the pure rebellious spirit of her punk youth, to end his days doing only what he wanted, with a rent of $ 170 per month. “He said: ‘Me, a scholarship, they are not going to give me, it will be the BS”, recalls Olivier. After he had a house, another crappy marriage, he came here. But in his fucked up side, he was a very organized guy, he was never late in his payments. ”

Henriette Valium is eternal

Olivier has a tender and lucid look on his father, who was absent from the scene at times, but with whom he reconnected as a teenager. The look of the son who understood who was really his father. Who knows that this man could not live without creating, and that the hard work on his designs came from his mother who made lace with incredible precision. Despite his ogre hands, Valium was very delicate.

“We were different. I’m much more square in the background, but I got along very well with him. When I was 16, living in the country, I used to say to my friends: “Are you going to see the beast?” We came from Joliette, you don’t realize it when you live in the city, but it traumatizes the good way to meet a guy like him. You discover that the planet is more diverse than what you know. ”

Olivier Henley would have taken a good 20 more years with his father, but he thinks he had a beautiful death, “because he could not bear to see himself wasting away, since he loved being alive so much” .

Olivier and Silvia will continue to pay the rent for the workshop. They both work to bring together his scattered work, which is more recognized in Europe, where the name Valium is forever associated with the counterculture of the 1980s. “Historically, you haven’t. the choice in Quebec to go through it. The Montreal punk scene was big and he was in it. “And he was fat in every way,” Silvia replies with a giggle.

There are two exhibitions in the works being prepared for Valium, celebrated since his death by his friends in little happy happenings. Just as much as his unclassifiable work, it is his soul that I wanted to recall here, at a time when the best of Montreal is suffocating under real estate projects and soulless speculators, when the bourgeois want to close theaters and kill the little we have left to feel human. The spirit of Patrick Henley, aka Henriette Valium, is here for good, because it is nothing short of vital.