Arthur Borgnis, Paris - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Forty One
I have seen Arthur Borgnis supporting other galleries at the Outsider Art Fair and then last year (2019), I chatted with him in his own incredible booth at the Paris version of the fair. His booth was jammed with so many beautiful and yet haunting works, which was a delight to look at. Coupled with watching his fascinating ‘Eternity Has No Door of Escape’ documentary, I wanted to learn more about this man. So here’s Arthur in part forty-one of my ’Meet the Collector’ series…
Arthur Borgnis at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris, 2019
1. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin?
I discovered art brut in 2016 during the writing and shooting of my film "Eternity has No Door of Escape" devoted to the history of art brut.
2. When did you become a collector of this art? How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? And do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home or elsewhere?
I bought my first work in 2017. I consider myself more of an amateur than a collector. I have about 60 works, not counting the stock. I don't attach importance to quantity or series, I prefer quality to quantity. It is more than a meeting; its a love at first sight. It's above all a love story, the works become life companions. I don't want to fall into the compulsive and dependent side.
Most of the works are on my walls but I regret not having a bigger apartment. I change the hanging regularly. I sometimes lend works for exhibitions, as was the case for Frantisek Jaroslav Pecka at the LaM museum (Lesage - Simon - Crépin - Painter sprites and healers)
From left to right : Mary T Smith / George Widener / Jerry Gretzinger / Mary T Smith
3. Can you tell us a bit about your background before your Gallery?
I started working on Leos Carax's "Les amants du Pont-Neuf " after my bachelors degree with the desire to become a filmmaker. Then I went on to make films for the cinema as an assistant director for more than ten years. I directed about 15 documentaries for French television. I continue this in parallel to my activity as a gallery owner, to direct and produce my films. I have just finished my first feature-length fiction film "Oylem", which is, as Aby Warburg would say, "a ghost story for grown-ups".
4. What year did you begin Galerie Arthur Borgnis? And alongside examples of well-known outsider artists, your Gallery has a focus on Czech mediumistic art – can you tell us more about this focus?
Before setting up my gallery I worked as a commission agent for art brut galleries. Then I set up my gallery a year and half ago. I'm fascinated by mediumistic art, which, along with art brut writings, is my favourite field. I went to show my film at the Olomouc art brut film festival in the Czech Republic. I knew that this country had a long history of mediumistic art and I already knew some of the works. The Olomouc region was one of the epicenters of this movement. I decided to stay there longer in order to make a film about this largely unknown field of Art Brut.
There I made some wonderful encounters and discovered incredible works such as those of Frantisek Jaroslav Pecka and Josef Kotzian. What interests me most in my job as a gallery owner is to go to a terra incognita (unknown or unexplored territory), to discover works and to be the bearer of a story… with Czech Art Brut I m in heaven.
Frantisek Jaroslav Pecka, 1928
5. As you are a collector and a dealer, where do you draw the line between the two… how do you decide what to keep and what to sell?
The beginnings were difficult for me because I had difficulty separating myself from the works. My job as a gallerist only served to enrich my collection. And then one day, after an impulse major purchase, I told myself that I was lost and that my passion must not become an alienation. To be a gallery owner is above all to be a smuggler. I keep the works that continue to enchant me every day. Sometimes the charm disappears so then I'll sell them. Of course, I keep the works that were offered to me.
6. You created the film ‘Eternity Has No Door of Escape’ in 2017 – can you tell us about this and why you chose to make it?
I've always been attracted in my film projects by the margins, because it's "the margins that hold the pages". There were no films on the history of Art Brut. And then this subject echoed the many questions I had been asking myself for a long time about the act of creation and its reception by cultural institutions. Art brut was a revelation - a shock as much of the aesthetic is intellectual and existential. This film opened the way for me towards another understanding and dimension of art.
I was overwhelmed by certain works of art brut that I had never been before, because, "Surging to each other in this encounter, we exist: me and this work, both unique" said the philosopher Henri Maldiney. Art brut is a question posed to art. It puts the inherent, irrepressible creative impulse of mankind from the Lascaux caves.
Left: Harald Stoffers / Melvin Way / Thérèse Bonnelalbay. Center John Urho Kemp / Yuichi Saito. Right: Tang Ziping / J. B Murray
7. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
The term Outsider art is the eponymous title of Roger Cardinal's book published in 1972 (the title of the book was to be the English translation of art brut: raw art). The book was exactly the continuity of Jean Dubuffet's art brut. In my film, the late Laurent Danchin explains that the notion of Outsider art broadened considerably at the end of the 70s, mainly for commercial reasons. Quality art brut is very difficult to find, which partly explains this drift.
Outsider art today includes folk art, homeless art and more broadly all the works that do not fit into contemporary art. And then there is in the term Outsider, that has a pejorative side that keeps these creations on the periphery of art history. Today it causes a confusion of genres. For my part, I use the term Art Brut because it allows me to clarify the lines.
8. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within this field? (for example, is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
Drawing and painting are the techniques that interest me the most. I also love the creators of big mysterious systems that we don't have the keys to. What's great about art brut is the audacity and freedom of certain creations that mix and merge different techniques such as collage, painting and writing, as shown in the works of Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Charles A.A Dellschau. I am passionate about mediumistic and writing artworks. When drawing, writing and collage meet in a work, I am in paradise as is the case with the work of the artist Jerry Gretzinger whom I represent. He's been working on an imaginary map since 1963. Everyday this drawing has been enlarged… extending a world and drawing the physiognomy of an unknown land, which gave birth to cities such as "Plaeides" or "Ukrainia". Fifty years later, he has created a poetic imaginary world in perpetual expansion with more than 3,000 maps.
9. Would you say you had a favorite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
My favorite artwork is "Elohim The World" by the American John Urho Kemp (1942-2010). His work is a cosmic, mystical and philosophical quest. It is a kind of contemporary Pythagoras, who used mathematics to access Revelation. He was a member of the Institute of Divine Metaphysical research which taught that salvation comes from the knowledge of the name of the Hebrew God Yahweh. Elohim is one of the ten names of God in the Kabbalistic tradition. He is the God of creation and it is the most used name in the Bible, and appears in the first verse of the Torah. His symbolic and "conceptual" work is an allusion to the theory of God's name and language developed by Kabbalah and has interested me for many years.
John Urho Kemp
10. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: a studio, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists?
There are no rules, it's the artworks that decides. I'm not a fan of auctions. What I prefer is to exchange with collectors, dealers and meet the artists. For me, art is all about meeting.
11. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
There was of course my first visit to the Art Brut collection in Lausanne, which was decisive, and then the one at the LaM too. This winter I was enthusiastic about "Scrivere Disegnando - Quand la langue cherche son autre" at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Genève. Andrea Bellini and Sarah Lombardi did a remarkable job of bringing together works of contemporary art and art brut dating from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. I was able to see side by side the letters of Emma Hauck and the microgram writings of one of my favorite writers Robert Walser, who most certainly knew Wölfli, since he entered the Waldau Clinic as a patient one year before the death of Saint Adolf. I also discovered remarkable contemporary artworks such as Dadamaino, Alighiero Boetti and Greta Schödl.
In this exhibition, writing abandons its communicative function to venture into the land of the incommunicable - the unspeakable. The exhibition dissolves the boundaries between writing and art and takes us back 6,000 years ago to Sumer. This kind of encounter between art brut and contemporary art is indispensable because art brut is still largely unknown and ghettoized. It favors an opening and allows the discovery of art brut to uninitiated people. The confrontation between these art brut creations and contemporary works is an opportunity to go beyond Dubuffet's polemical vision, which opposes art brut to the so-called cultural arts and makes us realize that these two fields emerge grown from such an encounter.
12. What do you have in the pipeline at the moment?
I am organizing, in partnership with Jean-Jacques Plaisance, an exhibition in September at the Gallery Les Yeux Fertiles in Paris. ‘Art brut à la folie!’ will present more than 35 different artists, covering more than 120 years of art brut creations from Emile Josome Hodinos to Jerry Gretzinger. A catalogue will be published on this occasion. I also have some collaborative projects within the contemporary art scene for next year.
Jerry Gretzinger, Jerry’s Map, (1963 - 2021)