HENRY DARGER
I don’t really care for contemporary outsider art. I find most of it not sophisticated enough. I’m not talking about refinement here, I’m referring to the amount of work put into one specific artistic direction. Most of the time, folk art feels like a hobby gone wrong: it’s crafty, it takes itself seriously in a good way, but there’s not much to it. But some of these artists who haven’t taken a conventional path in their craft have a different story. They’re possessed by something bigger than themselves. They spend a lifetime digging one specific hole. Obsession. Dedication. That’s only then that I get interested. Henry Darger’s world might be the most striking: a recluse, Darger (1892–1973) never showed his work to anyone. He never got a formal artistic education, but his universe is so creative, colorfoul and rich that I feel one could spend years studying it. One of the reasons that makes his work so compelling might be because it’s quite narrative - his work is composed of several hundred illustrations of a 15,000 page novel. It’s like an epic saga with bigger than life creature (the Vivian girls), who fight evil and try to stick together. Except everything is a little twisted and strange and medieval in an unrepressed way: little girls with penises or with horns, giant tornados, etc. I just saw some of his work in an exhibition in Paris and the scale of it (the sheer size of the panels, the quantity, but above all the quality) is absolutely amazing.
