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Ambroise Vollard, Leo Castelli and Denise René exemplify the way gallery owners can become such legendary figures that they remain forever fixed, like silhouettes or archetypes. With Christian Berst, the first contemporary Art Brut dealer in Paris, this tendency is particularly acute, as he works in an area where biography plays such a problematic role.

In his very nature, the outsider artist is so strongly defined by the circumstances of his life that the layman is quick to reduce his work to it. For some artists, catastrophe struck on the dark night they were conceived; for others, childhood dramas were the site of misdirections; for others still, the stirrings of adulthood and maturity were marked by an equivocal disengagement. Finally, some artists seem perfectly well-adjusted during the day, but invite the monsters of irrationality in at night.

In the best-case scenario, we know nothing about the life of the artist, and can happily explore his works, looking for suggestive clues. In Christian Berst’s case, I have never heard his life story, and I have simply looked for clues as to what drives his passion, his individuality, his centrality to the landscape of contemporary art.

Reconstruction #1: the office

Every gallery owner is a puzzle, and this essential piece is a place only close friends and insiders can enter. Between the fundamentals (a handful of works whose presence is considered vital), new finds, rare objects, the mess on the worktable and the books kept within arm’s reach, the office is an outward projection of the mental world of the gallery owner. Any visit to a gallery should start there ; this is what I offer you, as a way of developing and contrasting what you see in the main exhibition space. Reconstruction #2: the bookshop Linking the work we see with what we can’t see, it reveals an abundance of editorial output. Beyond that, it is also the site for displaying contrasting works of art, giving a subtle yet critical conclusion to the current exhibition. It shows, above all, what is at the heart of Christian Berst’s relationship to art: his love of dialogue between different fields of creativity. This space will be used to exhibit the works of three contempoarry artists, whose creations ask us, in different ways, to reconsider our boundaries.

Reconstruction #3: the round table

The organization of round tables, another “area of expertise” of the gallery, is just as useful for shaping the semantic fields that allow us to understand the place of outsider art within the wider field of contemporary art, as it is for announcing “openings.” The conference with Christian Boltanski, organized in 2011, was a turning point for the perception of the gallery. For its anniversary, Christian Berst’s office has been transformed into a metaphorical round table, with its space devoted to a contemporary installation of Annette Messager’s works, which echo his own preoccupations.

as a critic, journalist, curator and collector, Stéphane Corréard has worksd for twenty years to discover new artists in France.

The second half of the 20th century, it is known, will have been dominated by a Duchampian influence, to the point of resembling a caricature. It’s simple, we couldn’t get away from it: from the manufactured objet, from art-as-action, from the body-as-sculpture, from dizzying speculation, from the invisible, from haphazard, etc. That is to say: from the ready-made, from chess-pieces, from the silence, from tonsure, from la Boîte Verte, from secret noises, from the standard measure for a meter and from all these things that Uncle Marcel had left us, which in the end turned out to be much more cumbersome than expected. A last-straw, coming from a follower of the infra-thin…

We couldn’t get away from it, and then a light went on, almost a counterfire. For Art Brut came in order to reintroduce the concept of necessity at the start of this twenty-first century. We’re still getting away from it, but everything is no longer only scratches, overgrowth, heaps, deformations, tensions, diagrams, bundles, prosopopoeia… In fact, the two flames will have burned brightly in parallel, rather, with certain actors even feeding the one and the other successively or simultaneously, like André Breton, who wrote the following of our Uncle in 1939: “Our friend Marcel Duchamp is surely the most intelligent man and (for many) the most unsettling of this first part of the twentieth century.” Naturally, Dubuffet was vocal about the

hatred he had for Duchamp. He even fulminated against him quite a bit with Hubert Damisch the time that Uncle Marcel managed to extort him for one thousand dollars in exchange for one of his engravings. It’s all there, the spending by the one, even badly, even too much, and the extreme poverty, to the point of stealing, even anorgasmia, maybe, in the other.

Unsettling: this qualifier that Breton attaches to Uncle Marcel is interesting. It seems to evoke a pebble in the shoe. The one provoking a light arrhythmia in the progress, at times a little too militant, of art history, and making us ask what (and with what) we are advancing. Beyond that, little does it matter what the pebble is made of. What counts, is that it is very solid, and placed in the right spot. Most walkers, however, prefer to live without it. Others, however, the great, legendary athletes of art history, prefer to make use of many, successively or simultaneously, for it amplifies the shift. And thus my intuition looks towards André Breton, of course, but also Arturo Schwarz, Jan Hoet or Harald Szeemann.

Incidentally, it might be rather useful for the partisans of a contemporary art of intention - those who get annoyed and still refuse, in many places, to assimilate Art Brut to highbrow art - to spend some time meditating several of Marcel Duchamp’s most powerful ideas. For if Uncle Marcel indeed said that “The viewers are the ones who make the paintings,” then it perhaps means that in the end, we don’t care about the intention of the artist. And anyhow, didn’t Uncle Marcel eagerly wonder: “Can one make works that are not art?” Could there be a more exact, more pure, more beautiful definition of Art Brut? Works, yes, and moreover, ones that are not art… And Uncle Marcel had predicted it: “The great artist of tomorrow will be underground.” It’s done, isn’t it?

I think about all this, when I wonder with an eager smile what big, what immense, ginormous birthday gift to get Christian Berst for the ten-year anniversary of his gallery, which has worked so hard to place the little pebble of Art Brut in the clodhopper of historians and art lovers… For the gift must, in fact, go to his visitors, to his friends, his sponsors, those who have allowed him to keep going throughout the decade. But the best gallery owner can only give what he has: his gallery. The gift is thus the whole gallery, with its stunning interior spaces, three beautifully luminous rooms overlooking the passage… So we have rearranged them, we have even flipped them around, we’ve turned them inside-out like a glove. To show how beautiful this gallery is, too, seen from the inside.

“Soit dix ans…” thus absolutely echoes “Étant donnés…,”the miraculously secret and obsessive installation of Duchamp, immoveable, totally impenetrable in every sense of the term. I wanted, incidentally, for the three rooms to remain lit late into the night, so that the ensemble may also be seen by incandescent light, through the voyeur holes, as Uncle Marcel would say, to not effectively dissimulate anything from us, the voyeurs, when, aesthetically, we seize these works that are not art.

Voyeurs, to be sure, but to be that we need clairvoyants: “Now, I act like a scoundrel as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I work to become a Seer: you will not understand everything, and I almost wouldn’t know how to explain it to you. It’s about reaching the unknown through the debauchery of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized myself as a poet. It is not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say: I think; one should say: People think me. - Sorry for the pun. - I is another.”