The turmoil of senseless beauty in Monaco
Quote from: LE FIGARO Friday 9 February 2007, page 29 de MARIE-GUY BARON
Monaco’s New National Museum brings together a century of works by artists suffering from mental illness.*
*Editor’s note: It is possible that this diagnosis applies to certain artists. According to my long-standing medical and personal knowledge, this is not the case for the artist Jacques Riousse, who is also exhibited here. – Prof. Dr. Ludwig Spätling
……… With ‘Beautés insensées. Figures, Histories and Masters of Irregular Art’, the third exhibition prefiguring this future institution, confirms the rigour of his policy. It goes so far as to call into question the theorisations of contemporary art, since the expression of irrationality, he explains, ‘raises many questions. It’s a hygienic act that brings us back to the magic source that’s been lost for a while’.
It’s a fascinating return to the origins of this subversive art form. Most of the 400 pieces assembled by specialist Bianca Tosatti are rarely exhibited, and many come from private collections or Italian institutions whose treasures are little known in France. It is ‘a selection of remarkable works close to the principle of Malraux’s Musée imaginaire’. The selection is well ordered, historically and by genre, to give a clearer understanding of these works that knead the flesh of the world to recreate another.
In the introduction, the body as the bearer of inner darkness in the psycho-pathological portraits recalls the depth of otherness in the drawings of their patients by doctors Romoli Righetti and Paul Gachet. The self-portraits of Antonio Ligabue
of Antonio Ligabue (1899-1965), who mutilated his face to become an eagle, or the mouths
the mouths of Belgian autistic artist Pascale Vincke (1974), and the photographic framing of portraits of Sophia Loren and Sandra Milo by Pietro Ghizzardi (1906-1986).
The fabrics room is a cavern full of colourful and poetic wonders. It leaves us breathless with admiration before we realise that we are entering a weave of organic and neuronic threads weaving the solitary destinies of Tarcisio Merati (1934-1995) or Giovanni Batista Podestà (1895-1976).
Marie-Rose Lortet’s (1945) sumptuous Mesure du vide (Measure of Emptiness), a crocheted and starched sculpture, takes our breath away. The clothes of anonymous underground weavers from Turin and the swaddling objects of Judith Scott (1943-2005) prepare us for the astonishment provoked by the anthropomorphic forms of Michel Nedjar’s fetish dolls (1947). Nedjar’s work evokes the dread of human beings crushed by suffering, particularly the memory of the Holocaust.
Devastated worlds
We find ourselves ready to tackle the incomprehensible, devastated worlds, or those permanently on the brink of collapse, into which the architectural delirium of carabinieri Francesco Toris (1863-1918), using the polished bones of leftover meals, and Émile Ratier (1894-1984), with his wooden Eiffel Towers of unstable balance, throws us.
The images of femininity in Franca Settembrini (1947-2003), the Italian Aloïse Corbaz, are disturbing, as are the studies of herself by Renata Bertolini
(1944) and the better-known works of Magde Gill (1882-1961), Jeanne Tripier (1869-1944) or Marguerite Burnat-Provins (1872-1952) and Ida Franziska Sofia Maly (1894-1941), who will plunge you into the secret shadows of otherness.
Back into the light with the mediums and visionaries. Clinging to the precision of their infinite universes, the major figures of irregular art, Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) and Carlo Zinelli (1916-1974), take you on a journey through their systems of preachers of great beauty, while Tarcisio Merati’s crazy wheeled machines, painted on cardboard, blaze with a rare chromatic harmony.
Nearby, the objects for the redemption of matter, made from scraps by the worker-priest Jacques Riousse(1911-2004), playfully convey his mystical approach. Ronan-Jim Sévellec (1938) and Francis Marshall (1946)’s fabulous Porte de Byzance (Byzantium Gate) opens onto the bedrooms, a place that is both intimate and hermetic, fascinating and disquieting. Fear also comes from the outside. Willem Van Genk (1927-2004), for example, created an extraordinary work of art from recycled materials that resonates with our concerns about the transformation of urban space.
Both disturbed and dazzled by the denied reality that emerges from all these senseless beauties, visitors end up on the edge of the fog of the soul with paintings by Edouardo Fraquelli (1933-1995), Arturo Tosi (1871-1956) and The Ligurian Night, the immense fresco on free-standing canvas by Pinot Galizio (1902-1964) acquired by Monaco’s New National Museum……
Exhibition room, quai Antoine-Ist.
Until 25 February 2007.
Tel: 00 377 93 15 19 62.
Catalogue edited by Bianca Tosatti, 368 p., 280 colour illus., Editions Skira.