Exhibition | CELESTIAL EPICS

Art Brut in the Decharme Collection

March 1 to May 19, 2024

Curators: Bruno Decharme, Barbara Safarova, Caroline Courrioux, Sam Stourdzé

The exhibition can be visited on your own (included in the Villa Medici ticket), as part of a guided tour or in family (activity adapted to children aged 5 to 10).

The exhibition invites visitors to discover 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme’s collection, a veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level.

Art brut has never ceased to shake up the history of art and nourish minds resistant to norms as it questions classic notions of art and creation as well as those relating to the normal and the pathological. But who are they, these artists of a special kind, witnesses to another world, strangers to stylistic trends and influences? They stay—or are kept—away from the culture of fine art as well as the codes and places that constitute it such as schools, academies, museums, art fairs, etc.

Works considered to be art brut, or outsider art in the English-speaking world, employ highly creative abilities that are directly in touch with the anomalies of the contemporary world such as war, destruction, social and economic injustice, child abuse (Henry Darger), propaganda images, and oppressive regimes (Ramon Losa, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, Alexander Lobanov).

Isolation, confinement, or exile sometimes drive the artist to escape into a fictional exploration of the universe (Adolf Wölfli), reinvent a parallel world (Aloïse Corbaz), or summon spirits, ghosts, hybrid creatures, and monstrous beasts that have always inhabited our collective unconscious.

Anthropomorphic figures, intimate geographies, talismanic drawings, mental cartographies, Indian temples, and Baroque architecture are all encountered on this journey between the margins. On the farthest fringes of the imagination, lost in reality, splashed with stars, the “outsiders” are constantly redrawing the contours of a universe they invent as they go along. With freedom and otherness as their only compasses, they gather, collect, fill in, decipher, blacken, distort, amplify, organize, and build. Without filters, they embark on great celestial epics.

The obsession and perseverance of collector Bruno Decharme, who has devoted his life to building up one of the world’s most important collections of art brut, invites us to question our convictions and take a benevolent look at the very notion of creation, putting forward the idea that to create a world is to create art.

→ Press release

The exhibition catalogue

Excerpt from the catalogue introduction:
Notes on a History of Art Brut in Italy, by Gustavo Giacosa

“Despite the presence of many artists of Italian origin in prestigious international collections of art brut, art history in Italy has until now neglected the existence of this field and its representatives. For these people, who have been excluded from the mainstream of history, there is an urgent need to include their artistic approaches in a non-stigmatising collective narrative. In fact, it would be more appropriate to speak of art brut – art that is deterritorialised and without borders – in Italy, rather than Italian art brut.
As the history of Italian art has been marked by its artists of genius, it’s hardly surprising that the quasi-religious devotion to the beauty of their works has prevented us from turning our gaze to art from the margins, radically foreign to these aesthetic canons.”

Published by Empire.

DECHARME COLLECTION

This collection, which began in the late 1970s, has now become a benchmark, bringing together four hundred major artists of art brut from the 18th century to the present day.

In 1999, Bruno Decharme founded the association abcd (art brut connaissance & diffusion), a research laboratory directed by Barbara Safarova, whose work is expressed through exhibitions, book publications, and film productions. Part of this collection, held by his family, is presented in the exhibition Épopées célestes (Celestial Epics).

Bruno Decharme

After studying philosophy and art history, Bruno Decharme became a film director. In the mid-1970s, his encounter with Jean Dubuffet’s art brut collection proved decisive. Since then, he has divided his time between cinema and his collection. In 2021, he donated nearly a thousand works to the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He is a member of the Art Brut Steering Committee at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Centre Pompidou.

Barbara Safarova

She is a film producer, holds a Ph.D. in literature and aesthetics, is president of the abcd association, and was program director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. She has published extensively on art brut and co-curated several exhibitions in France and abroad. She has just completed an anthology devoted to texts by American authors on art brut (to be published by JRP Éditions). She is a member of the Art Brut Steering Committee at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Centre Pompidou and teaches a seminar on art brut at the École du Louvre.

→ For more information, visit : abcd / ART BRUT

THE HISTORY OF ART BRUT

The concept of art brut is attributed to the French painter Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901 – Paris, 1985), who from 1945 onwards built up a collection of objects and productions made by psychiatric hospital patients, prisoners, marginalized people, loners, and other individuals “outside the system.” These self-taught creators produce without concern about others’ opinions, thereby helping to shape new languages, inventions, and techniques.

In his essay, L’Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels (Art Brut Preferred to the Cultural Arts. Paris, Galerie René Drouin, 1949), Jean Dubuffet defines art brut as “works executed by people untouched by artistic culture, in which mimicry, contrary to what happens with intellectuals, has little or no part, so that their authors draw everything (…) from their own background, and not from the clichés of classical or fashionable art. Here we are witnessing a pure, raw, artistic operation, reinvented in all its phases by its creator, based solely on their own impulses.”

While art brut’s domain is that of “the common man at work,” as Dubuffet put it, it can also be said that the fate of the latter is uncommon, characterized by a knot made between history and the artist’s private life, where one can no longer distinguish one from the other.

OUR CELESTIAL EPICS PROGRAMME

As an extension of the exhibition, an immersive concert will be held in the exhibition rooms.

Conference I Study day around the exhibition Celestial Epics
Friday, May 3, 2024 11 am to 17:30 pm
Free
Tickets

“I’m honoured to be born in your head“
Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 6 pm to 7 pm
By Séverine Ballon, Villa Medici Fellow
Tickets: €7 / €2 (SOLO, DUO, TRIBU cards)

With : Séverine Ballon; Joris Rühl, bass clarinet; Lê Quan Ninh, percussion; Édith Proust, actress; Babouillec, author
Tickets

Family visits with children aged 5 to 10
Every Sunday at 3pm in French and 4:30pm in Italian
Duration: 1h30
A fun tour across the exhibition rooms, led by a Villa Medici mediator.
Tickets

IMAGE CREDITS :
Cover image: Aloïse Corbaz, Untitled, between 1940 and 1950 © Collection Bruno Decharme
Photos of the exhibition © Daniele Molajoli
Catalog images © Daniele Molajoli
Portrait Bruno Decharme © Decharme
Portrait Barbara Safarova © Decharme
Anonymous, Untitled, First half of the 20th century © Collection Bruno Decharme
Marie Bodson, Untitled, 2020 © Collection Bruno Decharme
Mose Tolliver, Untitled, circa 1970 © Collection Bruno Decharme
Jean Dubuffet (Italy, 1960) © Paolo Monti