The Art of The Mad - Treger Saint Silvestre
MARINA ALMEIDA
Words
ANA VIEGAS
Portrait
ADOLF WÖLFLI
Richard Treger and António Saint Silvestre collect artworks that convey dream worlds and impossible realities.
It’s called Art Brut (aka Outsider Art) and it brings together those artists who move on the fringes of society, transforming difficult existences into objects that transmit their most instinctive and primitive side. A remarkable journey into the human mind.
António Saint Silvestre thinks that every artist is like a novel. This idea crops up in the middle of a conversation peppered with stories about the artists whose pieces comprise the collection he has nurtured with Richard Treger over four decades. Like the one about Adolf Wölfli, who was born into a poor family in Switzerland in 1864.
His parents handed him over to a peasant couple, who mistreated him. Imprisoned for two rapes at the age of 26, when released, he tried a third time and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He began to imagine a world where he could live. He drew cities, streets, countries, painted pictures and the walls of his room. People realised and would visit him. It's extraordinary.
Wölfli is just one of approximately 300 artists that feature in the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, one of the most important private collections of Art Brut in Europe.
First coined in 1946 by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, the term Art Brut denotes art made by those living on the margins of society. This might mean that they are committed to psychiatric institutions, incarcerated in prisons, have mental or cognitive issues, work as mediums or are just eccentrics. “Dubuffet was the friend of a psychiatrist in Switzerland and asked him to keep his patients’ drawings. He built up a fabulous collection. He wanted to prove that the artists of the time were doing nothing,” explains António. Dubuffet ended up donating the collection to Switzerland, where it can be seen at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne.
Outside the canons, free and without commercial designs, this type of art influenced both the artistic paradigm of the time and the lives of António and Richard, who collected contemporary art at the time. One day, they noticed some great wooden door handles at a hotel where they were staying and wanted to know who made them. After being told it was the Portuguese artist Mário Chichorro, this led to Luis Marcel's gallery and the discovery of Art Brut. Newcomers to this new universe, they bought two drawings by the Russian artist Alexander Lobanov (1924-2003) at a fair in New York. “It was the first realisation that we were getting into art brut. From then on, we only bought Art Brut,” says António.
ALEXANDER LOBANOV
TREGER | SAINT SILVESTRE
These pieces became part of their life. When they decided to open their own gallery in Paris, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they chose to show Art Singulier, which they say is very similar to Art Brut. “We were in a neighbourhood where there were a hundred galleries, so we wanted to show different things.” They called it the gallery of horrors: “We discovered Art Brut before it became fashionable. People looked at us as if were mad. We were in a very conservative, very mainstream area”, says the collector.
The Richard Treger gallery closed in 2010, after exhibiting art for 25 years, while António and Richard pressed ahead with their collection. The collectors currently divide their time between Paris and Lisbon, and since 2014, the collection, which currently has around 2,000 pieces, has a permanent home at the Centro de Arte Oliva, in São João do Madeira, in the north of Portugal. It was from there that it emerged from crates and began to reveal itself to the world.
Africa’s influence
António Saint Silvestre (a 77-year-old, self-taught sculptor) and Richard Treger (a 75-year-old musician) may have met in the French capital, but they both boast African roots (António was born in Mozambique to Portuguese parents, while Richard was born in Zimbabwe). The relationship they have with the continent has shaped their worldview, what with African tribal art being a natural extension of community life; something made to heal, to make things grow, to make it rain. Its primitive and authentic character has always affected them and influences the Treger Saint Silvestre collection. Every piece was bought “with the heart”.
“We are art brut, compulsive buyers”, jokes Richard, alluding to the repetitive nature of many works by Art Brut artists and their obduracy as collectors. They work with the Christian Berst gallery in Paris. If Art Brut was unknown when they started collecting, it's now fashionable. Prices have gone up and there are even fakes — Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011) is one of the most copied artists.
Tichý made his cameras out of toilet paper roll and two lenses. He would buy the negative and shoot with that. He would hide in parks and photograph ladies' bottoms and legs. He's very famous. Of course, he had problems.
MIROSLAV TICHÝ
MARCEL BASCOULARD
Photography is fashionable in Art Brut.
There's a guy called [Marcel] Bascoulard (1913-1978) who became homeless and lived in a lorry. He had a small pension to live on and with the money he received he bought fabrics, had dresses made, bought an automatic camera, dressed up as a woman and took photographs. The dresses are incredible, as are the photographs.
And Lee Godie (1908-1994). She lived on the streets and went to the photo booth every day to take photos of herself in different poses. She's amazing.
JAIME FERNANDES
Jaime Fernandes, the Portuguese
Due to the marginal aspect of this art, it’s often only discovered after the author’s death. In other cases, it's not even possible to identify who did what. “The work of hardcore Art Brut artists has been found after their death, tucked away in hospitals, etc.,” Richard points out. This is the case of the Portuguese artist Jaime Fernandes, who lived for three decades in Lisbon's Miguel Bombarda Hospital, where he died in 1969.
Jaime Fernandes is one of the most famous Art Brut artists. Luckily, during his time, there were no workshops, no teachers teaching, and his work was done spontaneously and is very sophisticated.
JACQUES DEAL
JANKO DOMŠIČ
These drawings make an impression. Repeated gestures, aligned words, ballpen lines forming patterns, filling in human and animal shapes.
They caught the attention of psychiatrist Margarida Cordeiro shortly after Fernandes’ death. She first
saw his work framed in an office and wanted a closer look, discovering the art of a man hailing from a village in the Guarda area, who had been hospitalised for schizophrenia. “He used random materials for his art: ballpoint pens, pencils, blood, merbromin, earth, leaves...”, writes Cordeiro in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Centro de Arte Oliva dedicated to Jaime Fernandes in 2021 - an important show that brought together 74 drawings from various collections around the world, including that of Treger Saint Silvestre.
This instinctive, torrential, genuine side that characterises the Portuguese artist's work, fuels collectors’ interest. “They invented languages, landscapes, worlds. As soon as they start taking medication, they calm down and start creating flowers and landscapes,” says António Saint Silvestre.
Another story, that of Swiss Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964):
She worked at Wilhelm II’s court in Germany and began writing love letters to the emperor, which led to her being sent away and admitted to a hospital in Switzerland (diagnosed with schizophrenia). She would sew paper together and make 25-metre paintings. She was immediately considered special.
There’s an enthusiasm in the stories being told, which are even better understood when browsing the catalogues or seeing the works on display (or in storage, at the Centro de Arte Oliva). The drawings are fascinating and convey the complex world of each artist. There are also sculptures, such as the intricate installations by Alfred Marié (1951), which are created using objects he found on the street.
The most recent piece in the collection is by Madge Gill (1882-1961):
She was a medium and talked to spirits. She drew on rolls of fabric.
ALOÏSE CORBAZ
ALOÏSE CORBAZ
ZMB
AL-MAHJOUB JABER
The collection is a journey of human depths. António Saint Silvestre and Richard Treger are concerned about the fate of such a legacy, fearing that the council-managed Centro de Arte Oliva won't have the means to keep it permanently. “The joy of having a collection is finding the pieces, scouting around. If you give them to someone, they end up selling them. Collecting is great, but large collections are a problem,” Richard admits. For the time being, this catalogue of worlds is kept and preserved in São João da Madeira. From here, it will travel to exhibitions in Portugal and the rest of the world.
“Someone once said that Art Brut is an art without artists. That's nonsense. They're artists like any other,” says António Saint Silvestre.
AUGUSTIN LESAGE
