Art Spirite, Mediumnique, Visionnaire

The works of Madge Gill, a mediumistic artist from the mid-20th century, were collected by Jean Dubuffet. Guided by a spirit and in a trance state, Madge Gill drew in ink on surfaces ranging from small formats to rolls of over a hundred meters. Her entire body of work was only discovered after she died in 1961. Today considered a key figure in outsider art, her works can be found in major European and North American collections: American Folk Art Museum (New York, USA), the Museum of Everything (UK), Arnulf Rainer Collection (Austria), Damman (Switzerland), Treger Saint Silvestre (Portugal), etc. In 2024, her works will be presented at the Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Augustin Lesage was born in 1876 in Brittany to a family of miners. At the age of fourteen he went to work in the mines, where, in 1911, “(he) heard a voice that said clearly, ‘one day you will be a painter.’” Afraid of being considered mentally unstable, he kept this revelation to himself and began to explore spiritualism. During one seance, a message conveyed by spirits confirmed his artistic calling. Under their instruction, he made nonrepresentational drawings of spiral shapes in colored pencil. The spirits would soon tell Lesage to set his pencils aside and to work with oil paint instead. The miner followed their orders. His first canvas -very large, at 3m² _ revealed a new style,[…]

A mediumistic artist, Raphael Lonné only started to draw in 1950, during a spiritualism session. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet a decade later, he is now considered a classic of this particular category of art brut: spiritual artists. Raphael Lonné has experimented with various techniques, from graphite to ink to watercolor. He mainly draws small formats on paper. Present in many collections, such as those of the American Folk Art Museum (USA) or the LaM (France), and Centro de Arte Oliva (Portugal) he was part of the traveling exhibition Inner Worlds Outside in 2006, alongside Miro, Kandinsky, and Picabia.

It was in the early 1960s that this humble Moravian woman began producing a body of work for which her background had not prepared her, responding strikingly to impulses from deep within. Thus, at a time when the demons of the night still contended with the seminal hues of dawn, she would, in her mind, pick strange flowers and bring them to life on paper. Anna Zemánková is now a well-established figure in Art Brut, to the point that she was honored at the Venice Biennale in 2013, before a significant collection of her works was acquired by the Centre Pompidou, followed by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. In 2024, her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale for the second time, under the curatorship of Adriano Pedrosa.

Marguerite Burnat-Provins, est née dans une famille aisée et cultivée. Encouragée par son père, l’enfant s’investit très tôt dans l’écriture et la peinture, et suit une formation artistique à Paris. Mariée à un architecte suisse, elle peint et écrit mais divorce en 1906 pour épouser un jeune ingénieur. Le couple est installé à Bayonne lorsque la Première Guerre mondiale éclate. De santé déjà fragile, le conflit provoque chez elle un choc qui la pousse à produire une série d’œuvres picturales inédites, intitulée « Ma ville ». Marguerite dessine et peint sous dictée, en proie à des hallucinations. « Je les subis, je les sens venir en courbant les épaules et je ne peux pas ne pas les dessiner.[…]