PARIS.- For the first time in France, Jean-Hubert Martin - historian of art, heritage officer and curator (Magiciens de la Terre (1989), Carambolages (2016), ...) has accepted the invitation of two galleries in Paris, christian berst art brut and Jean Brolly gallery to curate an exhibition intiating a fertile dialogue between Art Brut and contemporary art. The exhibition On the edge is to discover, at the same time in the two galleries, and will be the object of a catalogue (200 pages) with a text by Jean-Hubert Martin and prefaces written by Jean Brolly and Christian Berst.

Foreword by Christian Berst: Art Brut has entered a new era: formerly followed by enlightened amateurs as rare as they were exclusive, these works, having risen from alterity, are now frequently associated with more predictable artistic productions.

But the stakes of including them in the field of licensed art go much further than the questions about how they are shown or the way they are contextualized. Indeed, the typical dialectic seems to have no hold over these works, which are devoid of any explicit reference to art history. They oblige us, on the contrary, to rethink this history, which, from now on, can no longer be seen as a continuum, but rather as a rhizomatic complex structure.

A network where history, cultures, sources and forms no longer interact according to an almost-Darwinian and Western-centric linearity, but a network that forces us to reconsider art as a substantive and metaphysical human fact. A gesture in which the magical and the mysterious transcend the previous partitions and nullify the comfortable bipolarities as well as the deceptive quest for beauty.

By what means, then, should we penetrate and interpret the works, those which are “unthought” by academies, and those which are produced under the tutelary yoke of art history?

Comparison is not reason –it may even be folly – but putting such heteroclitic productions into an entropic dialogue is a path that offers the most exciting perspectives. It was the one chosen by Jean-Hubert Martin – starting with Magicians of the Earth, in 1989, up until Carambolages, today – by looking for the emergence of a hidden sense in the collision and juxtaposition of themes or forms. Also by inviting the observer to take on his own share, his own responsibility, enjoining him to think with his eyes, to stand On the Wire.

Artists exhibited: Didier Amblard, Bernard Aubertin, Denise Aubertin, Beverly Baker, Franco Bellucci, Ben, Eric Benetto, Thérèse Bonnelalbay, Marina Bourdoncle, Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré, Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Rosa Cazhur, Nicolas Chardon, Alan Charlton, Mathieu Cherkit, Jean Claus, Vincent Corpet, Krijn de Koning, John Devlin, Janko Domsic, Eugène Dodeigne, José Manuel Egea, Sebastián Ferreira, Filip Francis, Alexandro Garcia, Paul Armand Gette, Fengyi Guo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Josef Hofer, Xie Hong, Rémy Hysbergue, Myung Ok-Han, Peter Kapeller, John Urho Kemp, Adama Kouyaté, Eugène Leroy, Pierre Molinier, Albert Moser, Michel Nedjar, Marilena Pelosi, Raphaëlle Ricol, Royal Robertson, Patricia Salen, David Scher, Daniel Schlier, Milton Schwartz, Judith Scott, José Johann Seinen, Henry Speller, Harald Stoffers, Benjamin Swaim, Ionel Talpazan, Miroslav Tichý, David Tremlett, Bernard Voïta, August Walla, We are the Painters (Nicolas Beaumelle& Aurélien Porte), Scottie Wilson, Adolf Wölfli, Carlo Zinelli, Zorro.