MONsens

Committed at 31 years old after participating in the Spanish Civil War, Carlo Zinelli is now seen as a major figure of art brut. Like tales illustrating episodes of his life before his internment, his iterative and dislocated drawings in which perspective is abandoned and replaced by interstitial writings aligned with the concept of “modernity”. Honoured in many international exhibitions, Carlo Zinelli was exhibited in the Giardini at the 2013 Venice Biennale. A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou in 2021.

He is the most widely exhibited and published living art brut artist, yet the extraordinary trajectory of this Frenchman raises a question that is rarely addressed: that of the impermanence of art brut. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet at a time when he was working on the resurgence of the symbolic body, he allowed himself to become the protean artist we know and who, in his creation, embodies absolute freedom. His work can be found in countless collections, and he was the first artist brut to enter the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Pompidou). Exhibited at the Monnaie de Paris, the Albertina Museum and the Mona, Michel Nedjar has been the subject of nine monographic exhibitions.

For more than thirty years, Pascal Tassini has been frequenting the Workshop of Créahm (Belgium), where he created his own house of objects attached to each other by rosaries of cloth knots. As with Schwitters, Tassini’s Merzbau is protean and evolutionary. This “hidden husband of Annette Messenger” (says Léa Chauvel-Lévy) produces, with a similar process, the various elements necessary for the sumptuous wedding he dreams of, from the wedding dress to the buttonholes. Presented in 2019 in the exhibition “Extravaganza” of the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, Pascal Tassini is also part of the collections of the Madmusée (Belgium) and the Hervé Lancelin Pinacotheque (Luxembourg).