Le Bord des Mondes | christian berst

The gallery lent two works by Jean Perdrizet for the Palais de Tokyo exhibition : Le bord des Mondes.

Are there works that are not works of art? Questioning as Duchamp did the essence of creation and its territories, the Palais de Tokyo explores interstitial worlds, at the borders of art, creation and invention.

The exhibition Le Bord des Mondes is an invitation to travel to the farthest reaches of creation by revealing the prodigious investigations and inventions of a number of visionaries, beyond the traditional realm of art. Situated at the edges of art and invention, the exhibition shatters the borders between worlds, between identified artistic territories and parallel worlds outside of the art system, by exploring the fertile precipice that can bring them together.

Around thirty creators – most of whom come from outside the field of art – develop visions and ideas that through their sheer beauty could certainly belong to it. Neither outsider nor naïve artists, no more than they are “eccentric,” these free spirits explore unknown forms and refresh our gaze, beyond cannons and disciplines. These are like so many stories that, through their originality and inventiveness, renew our attention to the mysterious zones of creation, expressed in its most audacious form. Here, experience, reinvention and the overcoming of divisions prevail.

Artists

Jean Perdrizet

This former bridge and pavement engineer, who became an “inventor,” fascinated all the scientists he met. He relentlessly sought to awaken consciences by overstepping the bounds of reason. The plans of his inventions, which he addressed to the highest scientific bodies, such as NASA, the CNRS or the Nobel Committee, are all invitations to reconsider the possibilities of physics, giving us the codes of an elsewhere. The one to whom we have dedicated an important monograph is present today in eminent collections : Mnan-Pompidou Center (France), collection de l’art brut (Swiss), LaM (France), Pinacothèque Hervé Lancelin (Luxembourg) ou Antoine de Galbert (France).

George Widener

A former U.S. Air Force technician, chronically depressed and antisocial, it is only when he reached his thirties that he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. His syndrome is characterized by an eidetic memory that allows him to insert in his works a lot of data, especially encrypted, relating to his favorite subjects. Time, magic squares, the Titanic, and fictional megalopolises are among the recurring themes of his drawings. Present, among others, in the collections of the Smithsonian (Washington), his art has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, in the cult exhibition Le Bord des Mondes or in Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery in London. In 2024, he was exhibited at Lafayette Anticipations (Paris).

portrait - © © Mario del Curto, christian berst — art brut

Zdenek Košek

A typographer by training, Košek first became a fairly conventional artist. When he fell into psychosis, he began to produce works as radical as poetic. Convinced that he plays a decisive role in the sequencing of the world, he spends his time at his window, recording his observations - meteorology, bird flights, insignificant facts - and aggregating them into diagrams supposed to ward off chaos. For fifteen years and across the world, from the Palais de Tokyo to the Maison Rouge, from the MONA (Australia) to the DOX in Prague and The Rencontres d’Arles, his Sibylline maps have been constantly interrogating.

Le Bord des Mondes

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