Maria Faustina Stefanini was Philippe Pollet-Villard’s maternal grandmother. She was born 1899 in Mulazo – Nothern Italy – where she lived until her father who was a retailer, decided to cross the Alps with his family for a better life. They settled in Haute-Savoie. Maria Faustina became a beautiful woman who led an adventuress life. She never studied drawing, although her work was technically accurate and most importantly free and inventive with a unique theme : the obsession of physical decline. She drew her own intimate story and hallucinatory experiences in a feverish mood. Her relatives would say about her that she had mediumistic abilities. On Christmas 1970, she pined a note on her door : « gone for a trip ». One of her neighbors forced her door a couple of weeks later and discovered her in a state of extreme weakness. All the walls of her apartment were covered with frescoes in the same style as her small drawings.  She died in hospital a few days later.

This is a part of her production, restricted to about 300 charcoal drawings created over the course of one or two years and drawn on invoices from the Mobiloil gas station size 18 x 10,5 cm. 30 drawings belong to Bruno Decharme’s collection and are visible in the « ABCD de l’Art Brut » http://abcd-artbrut.net/collection/stefanini-maria-faustina/