EXHIBITION - I AM THE GHOST OF MY OWN OPERA AT THE RAW EDGES OF ART

For its grand winter exhibition, MO.CO. explores the question of self-narrative through a journey blending raw art and contemporary art.

The title of the exhibition is that of a song by Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) from 1983. This unclassifiable artist, whose musical work marked a whole generation of bands from the 1990s to 2000s, expresses this ambiguity of being both the actor, the spectator, and the builder of one’s life. To be the ghost of one’s own opera is to haunt a fabricated self-narrative: an inner theater where identity, memory, desire, and disappearance coexist without ever resolving.

The works gathered in this journey are not fragments of autobiographies in the classical sense, but psychic maps, snapshots of obsessive systems, repetitive writings, hallucinatory visions, devices situating a presence often out of sync with the world. The self-narrative thus appears as a paradoxical practice: both affirmation and dissolution, construction and overflow.

At the raw edges of art situates the exhibition in a friction zone: a space where the boundaries between raw art, expressive modernity, and contemporary creation become porous. This indeterminacy allows for exploration without hierarchy or label of creation where it emerges uncompromisingly, in intimate, precarious, and often unspectacular territories.

The artists gathered here - whether associated with raw art, self-taught, modern, or contemporary - share a common necessity: to produce forms capable of expressing an irreducible inner experience. The notion of raw art as defined in the 1950s by Jean Dubuffet cannot be applied in the same way to today’s creators. The widespread diffusion of images has reconfigured the conditions of all singular creation, blurring the markers that separated individual practice from common culture. Historian and philosopher Michel Thévoz himself questions the relevance of this category in his recent work on resourced raw art, emphasizing the notion of collectives as hubs for a renewal of artistic practice outside established circuits. Today, it is less about pointing to an exteriority to the system but affirming the intrinsic instability of the artistic gesture that can hardly fit into a society favoring closed and hierarchical forms.

The exhibition thus offers the spectator not a psychological reading of the subject, but a traversal of its multiple forms, where testimonies, fictions, flaws, and metamorphoses coexist.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, from 11 AM to 6 PM (October to May)

GOOD DEAL: Free entry at MO.CO. every first Sunday of the month. Entry and visits are free.

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