Celestial Epics. Art Brut in the Decharme Collection

The French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici presents an overview of art brut through a selection of works that come from the collection of filmmaker Bruno Decharme, started in the late 1970s. The concept of art brut, a “raw” and spontaneous art that goes beyond the constraints of traditional culture, is attributed to French painter Jean Dubuffet, who theorized it in 1945, after the horrors of World War II. The painter gave life to a collection of objects and works made by patients of psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, marginalized people, loners: individuals without artistic culture and “outside the system”, and as such able to create new languages or techniques.

The art brut of these outsiders, strangers to movements and devoid of the stylistic influences of schools and academies, 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. The works in Bruno Decharme’s collection display remarkable creativity, registering anomalies and distortions in the contemporary world or drawing the contours of parallel and fantastic worlds populated by the same spirits, ghosts, hybrid creatures and monstrous beasts that agitate our collective unconscious.

The journey between the margins recounted in the exhibition is studded with anthropomorphic figures, intimate geographies, talismanic drawings, mental maps, Indian temples and Baroque architecture: with freedom and otherness as their only compasses, the artists embark without filters on great celestial epics.

Photo: Fernandes © Collection Bruno Decharme