Art brut in Bulle: Marc Moret, a believer who is not always Catholic!

Every day, Marc Moret went up to see his “collages” placed like bodies on shrouds on the upper floor of his Colombettes farm, in Vuadens. A “ritual,” he said. The Fribourgeois, with the silhouette of a saint taken from a 13th century painting^e century, opened the curtains “like shedding light on something,” adds Lucienne Peiry.

For twenty-five years, the Art Brut specialist visited, questioned and accompanied him to this sanctuary. Where it was silent. Kneeled down and entered into communion with his “mom’s” or “grandfathers” collages. She is also one of the few to have seen the even more Spartan space where he worked in force. So harsh. So sovereign. Almost violent!

Yet in photos he seems so vulnerable and even more so when heard in a rare recorded interview. But Marc Moret listened to his inner strength, shocked. Jostled. And no doubt he increased it tenfold to create things, he said, “anti-aesthetic”. We understand that he was fleeing the insipid. Smooth it. Emptiness. To work on the fertility of memories, on the orgy of sensations and fill the terrible void with relief.

Work on matter – as on itself? – goes through the atomization of the existing. So he breaks, crushes, holes the bones of cattle, bottles, tools and other objects so ordinary and at the same time so personal that he collects on the farm. Before burying them in a glued magma and erecting its dizzying architectures.

“He has to work quickly, his craft glue dries quickly,” adds Lucienne Peiry. Each time, he really puts up a fight.” Heir to the family business on the farm, farmer who loved more than anything to caress his animals, poet and painter, it is in these “collages” that Marc Moret found… an emotional balance in his relationship with the world. And to the others. These twenty pieces created in less than five years allowed him to tame time and try to delay the death that he said he feared. Terribly!

Three years after she caught up with him – he was 78 years old – the Gruérien Museum can therefore show this work which Marc Moret could not part with. “These pieces had become for him like reliquaries, altars. There was no question of selling them and we had to negotiate at length for him to agree to part with them… temporarily,” says Lucienne Peiry, curator of the exhibition.

The precedents are rare: in 2017 at the Maison Rouge in Paris, in 2021 in Tokyo and at the Collection de l’Art brut in Lausanne. “This presentation, the first of this scale, had to be done here, in Bulle. We are a few kilometers from his farm and very close to Notre-Dame de Compassion, a church he attended. Here… it’s his whole life!”

Sacred art in red thread

Faith, the Fribourgeois had it from birth. He practiced it with his family, served as an altar server, before distancing himself from collective rites for a more personal vision. More intimate. But the link with religious decorum remains fundamental, according to Lucienne Peiry. She even made it the central theme of “Marc Moret, fortresses against anxiety”, comparing the work of the builder of memories and pieces of sacred art. A bias. A great idea!

It gives rise to parallels and some similarities allowing us to coax the ardor of Marc Moret drowned in this opulence, like its depth veiled in mystery. The gaze comes and goes, from the beads to the ornamental oddities, from the hair of the deceased braided by the nuns to those which escape from the designer’s pieces. These “collages” – he never called them anything else – help him to live, without his loved ones.

Made of haberdashery materials, the first emerged in 1998-1999, while his mother was dying. “I was quite close to my mother,” he later said in a TSR report. I feel like I’m extending his life a little. There I come for her. I still need her.” The tone is fusional. It remains so in front of the “Collage aux grandfathers”, the highest. One of the most complex and chilling, with a doll’s leg that stands out as a single note of flesh in a magma of stringy grays. It is also one of the last. It is 2002, the revolt has found answers, Marc Moret is 59 years old and feels more peaceful. “I merge with these collages, I have the impression that they are me. They took on another dimension, he told TSR. I recharge my batteries.”

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Florence Millioud joined the cultural section in 2011 out of a passion for people of culture, after having covered local politics and economics since 1994. An art historian, she collaborates in the writing of exhibition catalogs and monographic works on artists.More info

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