Life has something macabre about it. We do not choose to be born. When we are born, without expressing any opinion on it, without being in charge, the only thing we do is cry out in pain at what has happened and what lies ahead. We are born into a State, we live for it, within it – most of us, at any rate – and we learn to adapt, and comply with the rules, the social, emotional and political psychology ruling that State. Above all, it is macabre because, through that randomness, that magical deviation to which unfathomable Nature subjects us, some of us are born… different, abnormal – using the old and utterly horrendous terminology -, unadaptable, and, in the more benign version, neurodivergent.

Since then, medicine has controlled our identity. Medicine controls our autonomy. In these technoscientific, ideologically technocratic States, medicine frightens us. Medicine is condescending, it renders us obedient and submits us to the normality of modern disciplined, capitalist and neoliberal society, whenever we are driven mad by incomprehension, depression, hyperactivity or autism.

To admire L’Esprit Singulier [The Singular Spirit] – an exhibition featuring dozens and dozens of Art Brut works from the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection at Halle de Saint-Pierre in Paris – is like entering a collective of people who have not adapted to this normalising, neutralising regime – people who resist, who withdraw into themselves and their own, to liberate their nature and exorcise their demons and anxieties -, who finally build their own worlds, brimming with otherness, pain, but nonetheless their own. The uniqueness resides in each artist’s ability to translate the mental image into matter, to draw the unfathomable, to paint the invisible, and to create their own cure.

The exhibition acquires both a centripetal and centrifugal force. The room’s circular shape draws us towards the centre and away from it, heading for the walls, profusely crowded with works whose expressiveness ranges from the most delicate and meticulous to gestural and broad, emotive strokes. We are drawn to Dexter Nyamainasche’s community and activist boat, as well as to Pascal Tassini’s amorphous work, Anna Zemánková’s delicate flowery compositions or Carolein Smit’s almost satanic ceramics.

We are not trying to thoroughly define the term Art Brut in this article – but let’s retain the original language that gave form and gravitas to it. Some things have a specific importance that loses itself in translation. Emerging from the fringes, from those who are without social or political representation, from the nameless – the anonymous who stamp their existence with their hands, with the forming of shapes and the deformation of time and space – Art Brut is that group of artists who often evade the market and the art system’s regularisation and regulation. Although they are not synonyms, historians and experts are prone to labelling or taxonomising everything, which is why Art Brut appears alongside Singular Art, Outsider Art or Spirit Art. It all combines madness, and dissidence with the norm; the artists tune into different frequencies, forcing Art History itself to rewrite itself and, as stated by one of the collectors, António Saint Silvestre, “to correct or reinvent itself”. They are excavations from the depths of the soul, rage or liberation cries, lines, patterns, collages and brushstrokes of drama, terror, psychosis, but also of overcoming. This is a regenerative art, no matter how dark it may seem. This is the possible path for the maladjusted – my maladjusted brothers and sisters, the gender undecided, those who have not built their individuation other than through creation, sick, depressed, riding the asthenia of modern times, the atony of life, the anomie of the world and institutions.

Subversion abounds in every work. Dado (Mirodrag Djuric) paints the end of the world in pastel colours in Apocalypse, as if it were a delicately sweet and longed-for landscape that nevertheless sickens and makes us recoil under our fears of what is to come. A cloud that blurs into violent contours and that only the Bergsonian duration – la dureé – tells us is the de facto representation of that shapeless throng of monsters. Aloïse Corbaz’s Sphinx de Paris au Louvres et Bonapart d’Abrautès is a double-sided work that seduces with its comic, innocent, almost childlike eroticism. There is something about A.C.M.’s maquettes that immediately reminds us of Piranesi’s tortuous and indefinable prisons – not only in the almost fractal breakdown of constructions, but the process seems to encapsulate the artist in a single space-time, pasting, caring for, rusting, artificialising an immense miniature world. Mónica Machado’s ceramics, painstaking compositions of several objects glued together, like a cluster of souvenirs and knick-knacks, make one recognise something unforgettably Portuguese about them. Henry Darger’s illustrations tell stories of children attempting to free themselves from enslaving and cruel adults. Like many artists in the collection, Darger led a difficult life. When he died, his landlords stumbled upon thousands of pages about his life and a fictional work that would have been unprintable due to its 15.000 pages. Jaime Fernandes’ drawings – anthropomorphised figures, ghosts and animals, from a life spent in the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. George Widner’s obsession with numbers, lists and statistics, drawing maps and cartographies with stamps, pen and marker…

These stories are what interest me. To lose myself in someone else’s insanity, to lose myself in someone else’s life. To be merely a writer in this wind of geniuses’ journeys, who, as Christian Berst reminds us – a great connoisseur of the Treger Saint Silvestre collection and an expert in Art Brut topics – according to Aristotelian theory, “genius and madness are inseparable”. To digress into an endless display of characters, masks and identities that are built up according to their biographies. Life matters. Life’s story matters. These people are not helpless. This is not the outcome of occupational therapy. This is art, purely and simply, made with raw life, at times with suffering, admittedly, but also with a sense of play, and pleasure.

Collecting these artists is granting them the dignity they never had in life. It is about giving them the chance of a new life, now at the centre, universally recognised, free of their suffering – if that even matters to them, if that even makes any difference. Because there are unfathomable states of being, which come to be by… simply being.

Art Brut appears to add gravitas to a weightless life, one in which all things float untethered and everything swings frantically in an atomisation that overlooks the importance of creation for life. And that is why it is often fresher than the art produced by so-called contemporary artists.

L’Esprit Singulier – a folly of liberating madness – is at Halle de Saint-Pierre in Paris until August 14th. Curated by Martine Lusardy, it features dozens and dozens of artists from several continents in a wide-ranging display of the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, headquartered in São João da Madeira and with more than 1.500 pieces.