Flores del abismo 
by Luiz Carlos Mello

The primitive peoples did not consider that the fantastic ideas, the inspirations and improvisations of the persons affected by the epilepsy or other forms of mental disturbance would be something negligible and worthy of piety. "The deep consideration of the soul dominant transformed many times that person into someone with supernatural powers. He was loved and venerated or feared and observed, pursuant to the benign or aggressive form of the manifestations of his mental anomaly ".1

In the Christian West it was made customary to consider those manifestations like the fruit of the presence of the demon among the men. The scientific advances emerged in the Renaissance gave a new meaning to these disturbances, including in the area of the medicine what previously was fruit of the sin.

From that moment until the 20th century, the manifestations of the mental alterations were increasingly studied in terms of pathology.

Those psychic states of great wealth, which were highly valorized for a long time, are today labeled as morbid, without a due consideration of other aspects of that dark phenomenon. The individuals that live those states are submitted to a moral, spiritual and physical destruction< they are confined in the dark prisons that are the psychiatric hospitals.

Around the end of 18th century, the influences of the romanticism opened a small possibility for a most favorable vision of the insanity: the discovery of the creative capacity reflected in the expressive productions of the individuals confined in asylums. Those productions clamed since then by the sensitive side of those that were seen as wretched and with a deep pathology without recovery opportunities.

Initially, the study of that production, collected by medical psychiatrists, had scientific end for the diagnoses configuration.

Thus the first collections emerged: that of the Bethlehem Mental Asylum of London and that of the Crichton Royal Hospital of Scotland, both in the beginning of the 19th century.
The work Genius and Insanity by Lombroso, from 1882, was one of the first meaningful projects on the relationship among the psychic disorders and the artistic creativity. Any way, he did not think that the sick could produce extraordinary projects. 2

Only in the 20th century the artistic quality of those works starts to be recognized. In 1907, Marcel Grating, an essayist of the marginal problems, writes articles for the Mercure, of France, and the book The art of the madmen: Drawing, poetry and prose. Artists and psychiatrists as Max Ernst and Walter Morgenthaler begin to deepen in the artistic problems of the disquieting productions accomplished in the psychiatric institutions.3

It was with the monumental book of Hans Prinzhorn, Expressions of the insanity, from 1922, on the collection of Heidelberg, that the aesthetic value of those works began to be recognized publicly, above all by artists as Paul Klee and André Breton, among other, that remained fascinated by the spontaneity of the projects.

The collection of Heidelberg contains drawings, paintings and embroidery of sick of several clinics and nationalities, and it was begun probably by Emil Kraepelin. Director of the clinic among 1890 and 1903, he observed that the mental disease there can "release powers that are repressed by class inhibitions".4 It is curious that Kraepelin may have coined the term "precocious insanity" to define the disease that, his point of view, invariably carried to the individual to a degenerative process, to the deterioration.

In his book, Prinzhorn presents innovative theories on the psychology of the expression, valorizing the production accomplished by the sick, demonstrating that a creative energy, an instinctive need of expression survives to the breakup of the personality. He does not see distinction among insane and normal production, focalizing his attention in the formal configuration principles: repetitious trends, ornamentals, of order, symmetrical, symbolic, that are, in his manner of seeing, the creation of a language for the own author.

"Our patient are found in touch, in a totally irrational way, with the deepest truths, and many times they reveal, unconsciously, visions of trascendence (...) We reencounter thus, in a different context, the idea of the existence of psychic expression and of objects corresponding that, in all the men, in given conditions, would be almost identical, more or less as the physiological processes".5

Even if the work of Prinzhorn did not have a lot of influence in the psychiatry and the psychology, it quickly exercised influence in the artistic circles. Among 1929 and 1933, several temporary expositions were accomplished in France, Germany and Switzerland. The great impact created by these expositions also awoke a violent opposition among those that did not accept the artistic value of the works.

In 1933 the clinic of Heidelberg is taken by the nazism. Carl Schneider installs the program of extermination of the mentally ill and uses the collection for nazi propaganda. It begun a series of expositions in Germany and Austria commanded by Joseph Goebbels, that compared in negative way the array of Heidelberg with modern artists, as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Kandinsky, Kokoshka, Chagall and others.

The title of these exhibitions was "Degenerated Art". They contained a prejudiced approach to both manifestations, denying any artistic value. Great irony, that attitude of the nazism end up to prove that there are not frontiers among the "normal" and the "sick".

In 1945, the painter Jean Dubuffet begins one of the most important investigations developed in Europe. He creates the concept of "art brut" which is defined as "all specie productionsódrawings, paintings, embroidery, models, sculptures, etc., that present a spontaneous character and that are strongly inventive, that donít due nothing to the cultural polls of the art, and that have dark persons by authors, strange to the artistic professional circles".7

Thanks to his friends (writers, doctors and painters as Jean Paulham, Raymond Quenau, Paul Pudry, Gaston Ferdiere), Dubuffet takes contact with Swiss psychiatric institutions with the zeal of discovering productions that encourage his investigation in wheel to the concept of "art brut".

"We, desirous of productions that escape to the procedures and open new roads for the art, guide a part of our investigations to given sectors where exist the better possibilities of finding quite strong individuals, in all the fields, that challenge the social conventions, and that are animated by the necessary alienation spirit. This carried us to investigate the works of those that, by far time, were nominated with the term "alienated" and that, driven by a strong individualism and carrying further that the others its consequences, were declared inept for the social life and confined in asylums. We find some cases (rare, in truth) of works with an extraordinary inventions and that with a more detailed observation are discovered as completely lucid, as the most methodically built and administered than we know".8

Dubuffet does not expect that the art will be normal. To the contrary, that it will be unpublished, unforeseen and extremely imaginative.

After gathering a certain quantity of works, sheath the Company of Art Brut. In 1949 accomplishes the first exposition in the Gallery of René Drouin, with 200 works. The catalogue of the exposition contained a manifesto titled The art brut preferred to the cultural arts. The only Brazilian that participated in the exhibition was Albino Brás, who was known as "the different of São Paulo".9 24 of March of 1949, after taking knowledge of the work developed by the Dr. Nise Da Silveira in Brazil, Dubuffet writes a letter telling that contains the history and the bases of his investigation, requesting photographs of the works of the collection that was formed in Brazil that decade.

In February of 1976 the city of Lausanne put to arrangement the castle of Beaulieu for the installation of the Art Brut Museum. It became the most striking collection of Europe and continued developing and widening its array with the creations of new authors.

In addition to promoting expositions and high level publications, it inspired the creation of collections and museums in various countries: in 1982, LíARACINE, France; in 1984, Archimago, Brussels; in 1991, Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; in 1994, Museum voor Naïve Kunst en Outsider Art, Holland, in 1995, American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, etc.

In Brazil, the interest in that production emerged in São Paulo, with Osório César, when, in 1923, he was nominated internal psychiatry student of the hospital Juqueri.

From the beginning he already had in mind the idea of studying the art of the alienated, comparing it with the art of the primitive and of the children. That vision emerged fundamentally with the books Expressions of the insanity, by Prinzhorn, and The Art and the Insanity, by Vincho. From that moment, he rejoins a vast bibliography brought from Europe. Based in his experience and the accumulation of the spontaneous production accomplished by the mentally ill: painting, poetry, modelings, etc., writes his first book, The artistic expression of the alienated (1929), where he states: " The artistic representations of these people are all emotional, since they have an spontaneous character and are directed toward a single aim: the satisfaction of an instinctive necessity. They represent emotion accumulated during much time in the subconscious, lulled by the censorship, by virtue of certain moral order impulses. "10

The preliminary work that originate that book was sent by Osório to various personalities, including Freud, who agrees with the publication in the Imago magazine, expressing satisfaction by the interest that the psychoanalysis awoke in Brazil.

In 1934 he writes the article The art of the mentally ill and of the vanguardists, in which he express his respect and admiration to the creators confined in the psychiatric hospital:

" A large part of the alienated of the hospitals is delivery spontaneously to all sort of artistic activities: painting, sculpture, poetry and music. And this fact is common even in the uneducated individuals that in the normal life never were interested by such things. "

Those artistic manifestations, so remarkable in these cloistered mental patients, cause us great admiration and therefore instigate our spirit to seek an explanation of that proceed. Since everybody thinks that a madman is an individual that only knows to say cloddish and fun things as a circus clown, that always is making wrong things; that is enraged by petty things (...) The alienated is not always that way".11

The first exposition organized by Osório César was in the Art Museum of São Paulo, in October of 1948. His work awoke interest in artists and intellectual such as Flavio de Carvalho, Lourival Gomes Machado, Sergio Millet, Quirino da Silva and Luis Martins, in addition to psychiatrists, that accomplished encounters and discussions on the problems awoken by this production.

Large part of this array was lost or marketed; some drawings of the beginnings were donated by Osório to the Art Museum of São Paulo and they are represented in this exposition by projects of Albino Brás, the most ancient of all those which integrate it.

What exceeded of this collection was found in a shed of the Hospital Juqueri by a group of officials. Other works, disperse in the complex hospitable, were found. The effort of the equipment that organized the collection, Heloisa Ferraz, Solange del Nero, Lourdes Rooster, Hellenic Fenerich and others, had as a result the opening of the Museum Osório César in December of 1985, in the ancient residence of the first director of the Juqueri, Dr. Franco da Rocha. Its array contains more than five thousand works, among drawings, paintings, sculptures and engravings. The most part belong to the decades of theí 40 andí 50, when operated the Free School of Plastic Arts of Juqueri, created by Osório.12

Ever since its inauguration, the museum promotes expositions and publications, and maintains until today an art studio in operation.

Dissenting with the violent methods of psychiatric treatment that were used in the era, as the electroshock, the lobotomy, Dra.Nise gives da Silveira finds in the occupational therapy a different treatment for the schizophrenics.

Sheath then, in May of 1946, the Service of Therapeutic Occupational in the Psychiatric Center Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro, that progressively adopted 17 activities: shoe store, theatre, gardening, music, carpentry, binding, recreation, etc.

The Museum of Images of the Unconscious emerges in 1952 with expressive activities such as the painting, modeling and xylography.

The painting studio was opened 9 of September of 1946 and had as supervisory the artist Almir Mavignier, today an international renown painter and art teacher. His participation was fundamental in the history of this work, offering, and also discovering, the better conditions so that those beings could create freely, without any interference.

The Psychiatric Center had in that time 1500 internal, for the most part chronic schizofrenics, that normally remained abandoned in the courtyards of the hospital. It was in those courtyards and in the nursings that was beed discovering and gathering in the shop a group of schizofrenics whose production was outstanding from the very beginning.

The offices of the Occupational Therapy were attracting to its various sectors the persons abandoned in the courtyards of the hospital by the random of the notóaction, in a life thoroughly hides behind their uniform. In the battle for a change in the hospitable environment, they were emerging almost at the same time exceptional beings as Emygdio de Barros, Raphael Domingues, Adelina Gomes, Isaac Liberato, Carlos Pertuis, Fernando Diniz, Abelardo, Octávio, Lucio, owning of an extraordinary expression capacity. What force will have united so many fates?

Three months after the inauguration of the studio there was enough material to organize a small exposition. Thus, 22 of December of 1946, it was inaugurated, in the CPPII, the first exhibition of images painted by the sick. The exposition awoke great interest, and then it was moved, in February of 1947, to the building of the Education Ministry, located in the downtown area, making possible the access to the great public.

Surprising Dra. Nise, the Brazilian psychiatrists were interested less by that production than the art critics and the public.

A lot of them wrote articles in the newspapers: Antonio Bento, Rubem Navarra, Marc Berkovitz, etc. We underline among them Mário Pedrosa, critic of art of the Correo da Manha, whose comprehension of the matter appears in a clear and deep manner.

" An artist is not somebody who has a diploma from the National School of Fine Arts, otherwise there would have been no artists among the primitive peoples, including our Indians. One of the most powerfull functions of art óas discovered by modern psychologyó is the revelation of the unconscious, and this is just as misterious in the normal as in the soócalled abnormal. The images of the unconscious are a symbolic language, the decoding of which is the challenge and duty of psychiatry. But no one can deny that these images and signs are, beyond all else, harmonious, seductive, dramatic, alive and beautiful; in short, they are in and of themselves real works of art ".13

In 1949 the French art critic Leon Degand, Director of the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo, visit, guest by Mário Pedrosa, the Occupational Therapy section, and was impressed with the artistic quality of the works, proposing then an exposition for the public of São Paulo. The selection accomplished by him together with Mário Pedrosa had as title 9 Artists of Engenho de Dentro and was inaugurated 12 of October of 1949. In the preface of the catalogue, Nise da Silveira asserts: " The director of the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo visited the painting and sculpture study of the Pschiatric Center of Rio and did not doubt in attributing a real artistic value to many of the works accomplished by confined men and women. Perhaps this opinion of a cognizant of art surprised a lot of people. The madmen are considered usually absurd and brutalizeed beings. It is difficult to admit that individual labeled in that way in hospices will be able of accomplishing some comparable thing to the creations of legitimate artists that are asserted just in the dominance of the art, the highest human activity ".14

The exposition 9 Artists of Engenho de Dentro had a huge repercussion in the public and in the press, in chronicles of Sergio Millet, Quirino da Silva, Osório Borba, Jorge de Lima, Flavio de Aquino, etc.

A polemics was unlished, a real discussion in the press between Mario Pedrosa and Quirino Campofiorito on the recognition or not of the artistic value of those works: " Our opinion on these drawings and paintings is that they are mediocre artistic demonstrations that have all the weaknesses of the casual works, inconsistent improvisation, lacking of the intelligence and reason conditions that should mark the artistic creation ".15

The argument of Mario Pedrosa is vehement: " All the work of Dra. Nise da Silveira consisted precisely in demonstrating that it is possible be insane and artist at the same time. She wanted to demonstrate precisely that there is not reason for be afraid of that affirmation and, in reality, answered in advance to the critics that, communicating with the vulgar opinion, judges that the madmen are brutalizeed beings confused in the distasteful category of "mentaly ill".

For us, they continue being formidable artists. And we challenge to the fact that, in front of some of those fabrics, somebody prove us the contrary. We are also disposed to appear before a critic and specialists court, for there to assert that Raphael it is an artist with the sensibility of a Matisse or of a Klee, and that the Municipal of Emygdio, for example, is a work that, by its expression force, by its creative breath and its special atmosphere, is unique in the Brazilian painting".

Enthusiastic by the environment of the studio and by the creations there accomplished, Mario Pedrosa made frequent visits, observing to the participants in the act of creating. He also visited Raphael and Emygdio in the house of their familiar, always in company of Almir Mavignier, Abraham Palatnik and Ivan Serpa.

On his experience in the museum, Mario Pedrosa says us: There, in effect, was beed gathering by chance a group of schizofrenics from the courtyard of the hospice toward the therapeutic meeting, then toward the studio, toward living together, where began to grow the affection and then it generates the creativity. The great discovery was the revelation of extraordinary personalities, born of the living together throughout the years, and whose works constitute already now a cultural patrimony of the Brazilian nation ".16

In an article of the end of the decade of theí 40 he created the expression "virgin art ", that defines as an art without the established academic conventions and of any routine of the photographic vision. He also came up with the idea of the Museum of the Origins, that would gather indigenous art, black art, art of the children and art of the madmen.

Beyond recognition of the artistic value of the array by the artists and expert in art the museum accomplished, throughout its 54 years of existence, more than 100 expositions in Brazil and abroad, giving greater emphasis to the scientific aspect of the collection, through the investigations developed by Dra. Nise and her collaborative. Participated of three world psychiatry congresses: Paris, 1950; Zurich, 1957; Rio de Janeiro, 1993.

The expositions always attracted great quantity of public, either by the fascination of the forms or by the revelation of the unconscious, being the most noteworthy Imágenes del inconsciente (in occasion of the centennial of C. G. Jung, in 1975, in the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro), Los innumerables estados del ser (1987, in the Paço Imperial of Rio de Janeiro, and in 1996 in Rome, as representative of the Portuguese language countries in occasion of the commemoration of 50 years of the U.N.) and Archaeology of the Psyche (1993, in the Casa FrancoóBrasilera of Rio de Janeiro).

Currently its array contains about 350 thousand works, among paintings, drawings and xylographies. Part of that collection is catalogued. It is, in its gender, one of the most important of the world.

The images produced in the studio outlined problems, interrogations that did not find answers in the academic psychiatric training. These problems impelled to Dra. Nise to deepen her knowledge of the processes that were unfolded in the interior of those individuals, revealed through images and symbols.

Those investigations, contrarily to the dominant psychiatric vision, never sought to discover pathologies in that production, but to penetrate in the dimensions and mysteries of the processes of the unconscious. The images constitute a universal material, and many times its comprehension is accomplished as of a comparison with the histories of the religion and of the art, with the mythology, etc., in a real archaeology of the psyche.

In 1950s, the Colony Juliano Moreira (Rio de Janeiro) that already developed various occupational therapy activitiesósports, cinema, radio, paintingó participates of the First World Psychiatry Congress in Paris, presenting works of the collection of Dr. Heitor Pérés. In May of the same year is accomplished the first paintings and drawings exposition in the same colony. The organizers had as goal to show to the great public that the sick mental is not a human disaster, as generally was thought, and that was able of a creative effort. In that era most of the produced paintings represented landscapes of the colony and its surroundings accomplished in the exteriors.17

Large part of that production was lost. In 1982 Maria Ameli Matte, Denise Correia de Almeida and Frederico Morais establish the Museum Nise da Silveira, addend to the existing paintings and assorted objects, the work of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, that became the most outstanding of the collection. Bispo never permitted, while he was live, no interference in his work, and the access to it was restricted to some few, according to his will. To the contrary of the other, his production was accomplished without any institutional support, as studio or material of work. He did not accomplish painted or drawn images: his work acts in the threeódimensional field, whose extreme originality made it able of gathering the most various daily objects of the hospital and to transform them into a new meaning.

He unraveled his despersonalizing uniform óthe ultimate symbol of the psychiatric institutionó to create his individuality. With those threads, embroidered clothes and linens, taken them to the mantles condition, into banners. He faced his work as a divine mission, he never intended to make art. He was cared about his work with extreme dedication until the day of his death.

Currently the museum accomplishes expositions and various therapeutic activities, defining itself as a dynamical and interactive life space.

Observing the high quality his work, Nise da Silveira presented him to Ivan Serpa. Enthusiastic, Ivan opened to her the doors of his studio, and Darcilio began to frequent it.

Founded in 1956, the House of the Palms is a pilot experience in psychiatry, that has as principle to avoid the cycle of hospital readmissions and it is destined for treatment and for the rehabilitation, operating with an external regime.

The experience developed there opened the doors for the emergence of various sorts of similar institutions, always with an external regime, implanting a new political of mental health that seeks to avoid the onerous and cruel admissions, collaborating for the gradual extinction of the asylum institutions. Initiatives as the Space Opened to the Time, in Rio de Janeiro, and the Psycoósocial Attention Centers (CAPS), originaly organized in Campinhas, São Paulo and Santos, are scattered all over Brasil.18

These various psycoósocial rehabilitation centers, where the expressive activities are the priority, certainly revealed new talents of the Brazilian plastic arts.

According to Nise gives Silveira: "confined them in psychiatric hospitals that have the resource of using the plastic language as a mean of expression, the gross artists, the marginal of several genders and arts, constitute a huge family".

There are certainly large distances and differences among them, but a great affinity approximates them. If we seek that common denominator, we will find always present in those individual peculiar contacts, in degrees more or less intensive, with the unconscious psyche, uncommon for the persons well adapted to the social procedures. The naive painters form other family, have the trend to represent the objects of the external world, finding pleasure and inspiration in them, to the contrary of the members of the other family, that are capsized to the interior representations, by more disquieting than sean".19

"The marginality is an universal phenomenon in its various categories, and among them there is a group of individuals that did not go through the traumas of the psychiatric institutions, that maintains contact with the social reality, but whose visions, dreams and internal world exercise always an essential paper in their stocks and creations".

In any case, in this exhibition participate the creators that lived in psychiatric centers, and be present not only by the quality of their production, but also by the fact that their works prevail in the principal collections and museums of the gender of the world.

Jean Dubuffet, in a text of 1948 asserts: " Among the most interesting works that we find, some are made by men that are considered sick mental confined in psychiatric establishments. It is natural that the private persons of occupation and of pleasures show a greater trend (what also happens with the prisoners) to accomplish, through an artistic activity, holidays for their own pleasure. The rigid idea that has, as a rule, on the health of the spirit and the insanity seems us based on frequently arbitrational distinctions (...) We intend, consequently, to see with the same eyes and without establishing special categories between the projects of "normal" and "sick" people ".20

The exposition that we present here is further proof that when we contemplate these works, with difficulty it can be distinguished whether the artistís spirit is healthy or not..

The title of the exposition, Images of the unconscious, evidently does not intend to define all of the works accomplished by these individuals: in many cases we find representations of the external world (landscapes, dead natures). In other, external world and internal world appear mixed. But, for the most part, these works reveal a stressed predominance of the interior world.

Certainly the creativity stays in the soó called "squizofrenic condition". According to a recent English investigation, the man speaks about 10 thousand different languages. But the deeper layer of the man is universal, and its language is expressed by the images of the unconscious, common to all of us.

In the squizofrenic experience, those images invade the field of the conscious with a great force and are approximated in a way to the sources of the creative process. It is therefore the importance of the expressive activities in the treatment, that also will be able to reveal, through extraordinary creations, the wealth of the psyche occupy by distant preoccupations.

But we do not have the illusion of the fact that the squizofrenia is a privilege for the one which wants to create. For the normal call as well as for the madman, the sensibility of forming forms extraordinary aesthetics always was given to some few, as proves it the experience. Hundreds of people went through the studios of several institution but only a few have stood out. On the other hand, from the therapeutic point of view, the statistics is other: the great majority is benefitted with those activities.


It was by the designs made in the walls of the nursing that Raphael began to frequent the studio of the Images of the Unconscious. And Carlos made drawings in toilet paper, keeping them as a great secret under the mattress of his bed.

In spite of having his own studio in the hospital, Fernando Diniz recaptureed old linens of the garbage, sewing and painting them with several ink caps, until transforming them in the Tapetes Digitales, as he designated them. They constituted gleaned setups that have as departure point, according to him, his own hand, /his fingers, resulting in geometric constructions from infinite combinations and colors.

Those examples in which the individual is carried to find in any element, in any object, means for his expression, also show an impulse toward the individuality that is revealed in the set of the works of these creators.

The plastic artist Abraham Palatnik, one of the inventors of the kinetic art, tells that his meeting with the creators of the Engenho de Dentro shocked him enormously, questioning his artistic and cultural concepts as compared to a spontaneous art that was not molded in the schools, and that had a purity and an exceptional vigor.

In that magic studio each creator revealed a profoundly individual universe that was at the same time universal. That experience impressed him in the search of his own road as artist.

The extreme originality that possess the works of these creators is the fruit of several factors: the almost total absence of academic training, the fluency in relationship to the spirit of the era, the withdrawal of the social interaction, etc. In that ontologic loneliness resides the certainty of Fernando Diniz when transforms the old art linens, or the determination of Bispo do Rosario to gather banal objects in the Colony Juliano Moreira óone of the terminal deposits of human beings in the chain of psychiatric admissionsó, transorming them in surprising facilities.

"His work was visceral. A continuous sacrifices routine dictated by angels. A sacred rite. For those and other emotions without containment, Arthur Bispo do Rosario saysí notí repeated times. No part of his shrine would fall in misfortune,í profaneedí for the exterior world. The work was the life, the life was the work".21

A human being that didnít have a studio, neither incentives on the part of his environment, built a work impelled by his interior, extremely contemporary, breaking and questioning the own means that compose the art.

Throughout the years, several terms were created to define the art of these most creative individualitys: psychoópathological art, gross art, degenerated art, outsider art.

All with the attempt of establishing definitions for that production. Certainly we should not have much appreciation by the definitions. All authentic art does not has rigid parameters, exists by itself. Beyond all convention, the creativity is imposed more than ever. If the spectator did not had references to the origin of this production, would not be realized of the fact that the autors are beings imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals.

Even if the aesthetics quality of their works may have been already recognized, other fundamental element is underlined: the great productivity of some of these beings.

For those creators, life and work are intimately bound. In the case of the Engenho de Dentro, in the day to day of the studio, Carlos produced 21500 projects; Adelina, 17500; Fernando Diniz, more than 30000.

Each one has his peculiarity in the creative act: Carlos created with an extraordinary rapidity, as if the image that went to be formed was ready beforehand and it would be launched on the paper as a missile, such is the force of the internal images imposing its presence. He does, standing, from three to four projects in pencil in /his last phase, that Mario Pedrosa pertinently called The long trip. Some of they form part of this exhibition.

In addition to producing intensely in the studio of the museum, Fernando Diniz proven all the sorts of paper that found in the hospital and its surroundings, bringing them to his room. There, he used those materials as supports for his creations, naming them as Recycled. Many times he used the two sides of the paper. For the accomplishment of the cartoon Estrella de Ocho Puntas, guided by the filmaker Marcos Magalhes in the period of 1992 to 1996, Fernando produced, with the most various technics, approximately 42000 drawings.

Emygdio produced about 3000 works. To the contrary of Carlos and Fernando, he was careful in the gesture, in the stroke. Sometimes it taked to him several days to end a fabric.

In Raphael, the sensitivity also was made present, each outline, each gesture was milimetric, was certain, he did not had studies to accomplish the work. All came of the followóup of the gesture. Mario Pedrosa gives us an extraordinary statement of his living together with Raphael:

"Itís going on about ten years now that Iíve been closely observing the creative efforts of some mentaly ill people; in them the process of painting or creating occurs, really, without conscious or intellectual control. I have seen Raphael sketch out in seconds, or in a few minutes, some of the most beautiful draeings of our time, and deemed by Breton to be better than those of Matisse. And it is, until today, with real fascination that I see him there in the house of his aging mother, on a steep hillside in Santa Teresa, going off from the neighborhood children he had been playing with to concentrate, in the blink of an eye, on himself, or smiling, mysteriously and happily, I donít know at whom, in a marvelous and very real game, in the course of which he would pass the pencil or brush back and forth, from one hand to the other behind his back, and continuing the same movement would let the other hand, now armed, run freely over his artqork, concluding a gesture that had come from afar. At these moments, yes, everything was a game, it was expression and authenticity." 22

The great majority of the authors that take part of this collection never had access in his life to the artistic mediums; the majority did not share the feeling of be making art in his activity. From thence comes the freedom and audacity in the creation, obeying simply to the interior music.

When, while visiting the studio of the museum, the painter Djanira praised the work of Emygdio "Oficina" by its balance and by the utilization of the colors, his response was not delayed: I am not a painter, I am a workman.

The following institutions participate in the exhibition: Museu Osório César (São Paulo), Casa das Palemiras, Museu Nise da Silveira and Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Rio de Janeiro). The final selection of the works counted on the consultancy of Lygia Pape, Lula Wanderley and Mario Fraga. In addition to the works, the thinks, the poetries, the curious facts of the life of the authors procure to recapture the human dimension that the psychiatry so much attempted to destroy. Thinking in a retrospective based on the emergence of this base in Brazil, we seek to select the creatives that could express in an exemplary way the diversity of their productions.

They are persons that lived large sufferings and deep loneliness, isolated of the mundane life for being unable, according to the psychiatric order, to live with the family and the society.

In the psychiatric institutions of the entire world they are labeled as absurd and brutalizeed beings. In spite of that tragic conception, of that abyss created by the science, emerge, of the deeper of the soul, the most unusual and beautiful images. It is that unsuspected wealth of the creation of those beings what we seek to show in this exposition.

Source:
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