The Crowd - February 27 through August 25, 2002

Outsider artists are individuals who are often destined for solitude, living and creating in secrecy and silence.  Paradoxically, many of them have devoted themselves to the graphic or pictorial representation of crowds.  The community in which they have experienced exclusion and eviction fascinates them.  Its is therefore through a prism that they depict their personal and fantasised vision of the social body.
Carlo’s silhouettes, outrageously schematised and tirelessly repeated, incontestably evoke the loss of human identity in the concentration camp-like universe of the psychiatric hospital.  With a vision that is just as hallucinatory, the former geneticist Gabritschevsky depicts processions of immobile ectoplasmic beings, which belong to a mutant humanity.  As for Helmut, he meticulously lines up his spectators on tiers of seats to bring order to human chaos and make it acceptable.
The theme of the crowd is therefore constructed in a kaleidoscopic manner.  Nevertheless, for each creator it constitutes an exultant formal invitation to systematic repetition, with serial variations and optical effects arising from accumulation.
The Crowd notably brings together the works of Carlo, Eugène Gabritschevsky, Helmut, Berthe Coulon, Oswald Tschirtner, Martine Copenaut and Gaston Teuscher.
A publication accompanies this exhibition; it includes a selection of reproductions of works, as well as texts by Jean-Pierre Keller, Erica Deuber Ziegler, Luc Debraine, Michel Thévoz and Lucienne Peiry.