In June 2021, Bruno Decharme's donation to the Centre Pompidou, with 921 works by 229 artists, broadened the audience for Art Brut, while filling a gap in the collections of the Musée National d'Art Moderne - which, it should be remembered, had passed by the Dubuffet donation due to France's lack of interest in Art Brut at the time. As for Maurice Renoma, best known as a stylist, his "failed photographs", as he calls them, contain all the ingredients of art brut: unpredictability, shooting on the spot, impulsive dimension, accidental aesthetics, intimacy... Worrying strangeness, too, sometimes... Bruno Decharme explains it well, answering Renoma that this exhibition jointly conducted owes "to his history, and his way of seeing things corresponding perfectly with art brut: an organized chaos, the art of patchwork, its freedom". The collector came with works that can be described as historical - those of Aloise Corbaz, Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli, Augustin Lesage, Carlo Zinelli ... So many creations that are steps aside, that Decharme completes by making one himself by bringing them closer to the photographs of Renoma. This medium, between documentary value and obsessive gaze, is moreover the object of all the attention of the collector, who shows its extent in four places and in eight exhibitions in Brussels this winter.

Extract of the interview with Emma Noyant published in the N°103 of the magazine Art Absolument. Publication date: October 14, 2022.

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