From 1 March to 19 May 2024, the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici presents the exhibition EPOPEE CELESTI. Art Brut in the Decharme collection, which brings together a selection of 180 works from Bruno Decharme's collection, a real overview of art brut.

The concept of art brut is attributed to the French painter Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901 - Paris, 1985) who, starting from 1945, created a collection of objects and works created by patients of psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, marginalized people, loners, people “outside the system”. These self-taught creators produce without worrying about the gaze of others and participate in the birth of new languages, inventions or techniques.

In the book L'Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels (The Art Brut preferred to the cultural arts. Paris, Galerie René Drouin, 1949), Jean Dubuffet defines art brut as "works performed by people who do not possess any artistic culture, in therefore mimicry, unlike what happens among intellectuals, has little or no role, so the authors rely only (...) on their own background and not on the clichés of classical art nor on fashionable art. Here we witness the pure, raw artistic operation, reinvented in all phases by its creator, based solely on his impulses."

Art brut has always shaken the history of art and nourished spirits refractory to the rules, questioning not only traditional notions of art and creation but also those of the normal and the pathological. But who are the artists of this particular genre, witnesses of another universe, unrelated to movements and devoid of stylistic influences? They are held, or are held, outside the culture of fine arts, the codes and places that constitute it: schools, academies, museums, fairs...

If the terrain in which art brut moves is that of the "common man at work", as Dubuffet stated, it can also be argued that his destiny is out of the ordinary, characterized by a link between History and the private life of the artist, in which it becomes impossible to separate one from the other.