abandon your children and a bourgeois life to paint in a 9-meter attic

What can go through a woman’s head to abandon her four children and a life of comfort for her? lock yourself up to paint In a 9 m2 home? Is paint an escape valve for depression and anxiety?

Definitely, yes. It is proven that painting regulates stressactivates the systems reward for traumaand rebuild the narrative processing (give meaning to the experience). This explains why creating images helps modulate emotion y reconstruct meanings.

Monique Gies (Paris, 1934 – Paris, 2022) was probably unaware of these scientific findings when she decided to abandon, aged 43 in 1977a bourgeois life in Alsace – husband, four children, school director – and locks herself in nine square meters in Paris.

While living in his terminal room in Paris, an attic for domestic use, He painted indiscriminately for at least two yearsfrom 1977 to 1979. His images, those that emanate from his mind, are disturbing and sinister.

Headless women, lying in the shaft of a spiral staircase with their crotches raw, dramatic perspectives of their room in sharp overhead views, a world in ocher and raw, atonal. Solitude, oppressive images, broken dolls, which translate into drawing the Gies’s complex interior dramaturgy.

His children couldn’t believe the rawness of these images whose artistic value they despised, even proposing to throw all this work in the trash, but it was one of their daughters, Marie-Christine Frison, who fought to make them known until she found the gallery Christophe Gaillard of Paris, who presented the first posthumous exhibition of this enigmatic woman in 2014.

“I talked to my brothers to ask them what we could do with it, and they told me that throw it in the trash. I replied that, as long as I was alive, we would not do such a thing. And I became obsessed with the paintings,” Marie-Christine recently declared.

“After leaving, and for two years, she cried every day. But she also told me that if she hadn’t she would have ended up in the psychiatric hospital. In that context, painting was a way for her to survive,” added her daughter who discovered that all of her mother’s depression comes from a child sexual abuse.

The exhibition Anagnorisis in The Goma (Doctor Fourquet, 4; until October 11) he rescues that fertile nucleus of 1977–1978 and presents it in a simple assemblywhere the paintings hang soberly on the wall, without decorations or accessories.

The paintings recreate the surreal language of broken dolls, although they also reference art history, as in The Valpinçon Bather of Dominique Ingresreinterpreted in a gloomy skeleton.

Its images are duplicated or expanded infinitely in space in a sinister way, crossing oppressive atmospheres, and repeating, over and over again, the torn limbs of a fragmented characterreligious symbols such as crucifixes also abound. She portrays herself crucified, an inheritance of the deep religiosity that was professed in her family.

This trauma iconography in which many of the images that appear – such as the rocking horse – are used by Gies as a visual anchor to what surrounded her at the time of the abuse, and that appear during his psychoanalysis sessions, in which he remembered something that seemed forgotten, that had been childhood rape victim from his mother’s brother.

The artist in life tried publicize your workand participated, in fact, in a group exhibition in 1979, collaborating with the magazine Witcheswhich gave him very partial visibility during his first years in Paris.

The emotional power of his canvases, beyond his condition as an artist outsidercaused an ethical dilemma in her children when it came to making their mother’s privacy known. They finally decided that the world should know their story, and their paintings should bear witness to the mental consequences of their abuse.

What is thert brut and what can we learn from it?

He art brut is an artistic movement whose term was coined in 1945 by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to refer to the art created by people outside the art world and without academic training, such as self-taught, psychiatric patients, social maladjustments, children or the elderly.

Many art theorists and critics claim that the art brut works outside the canons and fashions of art history, which is why it is a very more honest and connected to the human psyche, far from the ego and vanity of a mercantilist art system.

In Spain we have outstanding examples of artists who approach art from other places that are not essentially artistic practice. Josefa Tolrá, for example, made incredible drawings encouraged by messages from spirits during mediumistic trances.

In 1993 the Reina Sofía museum opened, Parallel visions. Modern artists and outsider art. The first major historical reading in a state museum, which marks the serious beginning of the issue on the Spanish agenda.

In this exhibition curated by Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, works by Adolf Wölfli, Aloïse Corbaz, Auguste Forestier and Spaniards such as Joaquim Vicens Gironella and Miguel Hernández were presented in dialogue with great painters such as Picasso or Christian Boltanski.

He art brut reorders the canon, broadening the essence of what is or is not art; connects artistic production with mental health, a relationship, scientifically proven, that reduce stressdepression and anxiety, also helping to narrate and to verbalize the trauma; displaces the academy as the only legitimate transmitter of form and image, democratizing artistic practicesreserved for a minority; They also make the personal work, the biographical as artistic, shifting the focus from historical or mythological themes to the individual and the personal, in addition to make marginality visible and loneliness of the victims.