Epopées Célestes

Epopées Célestes – Art brut dans la collection Decharme – A veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level, through 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme’s collection.
At the heart of an Académie where gesture is the apprenticeship of mastery, the Épopées célestes exhibition questions our certainties, and takes a critical yet benevolent look at the margins of creation, putting forward the idea that to make a world is to make a work.
Even before Jean Dubuffet coined the term in 1945, art brut has been shaking up art history and nurturing minds that resist the norm. 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.
If the territory of Art Brut is that of “the common man at work”, as Dubuffet put it, we can also say that the latter’s destiny is “out of the ordinary”, essentially indebted to his own psychic capacities, fed by a bubbling inner world, provided with borrowings from popular culture.
These productions, which the Anglo-Saxons refer to as outsider art, call on highly creative skills, in direct contact with the anomalies of the world. On the fringes of the imagination, lost in reality, splashed with stars, outsiders are constantly redrawing the geography of a universe they invent as they go along. With freedom and otherness as their only compasses, they gather, accumulate, fill in, decipher, blacken, distort, amplify, order and build. Without filters, they embarked on a celestial epic.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Villa Medici, Rome, in 2024.