The Christian Berst Gallery via its title is claiming , its specialization in presenting what has come to be referred to as “Art Brut” . As such, the Gallery is offering, until July 21, 2012, Albert Moser’s photographic panoramas, “Life as a panoramic”. 
André Rouillé, author of one of the catalog texts, explains how this now 84-year-old American photographer, wild and secret – autistic to some – could be associated with the “Art Brut galaxy”. Because “Art Brut” is something other than an artists’ field: a different art that can be expressed in different spaces, with different values, different results, different formalities. 
Born in 1928 in Trenton, New Jersey, Albert Moser lived with his Russian Jewish immigrant parents until he turned 60, save for the brief period he spent in the American army in Japan. It is thanks to the army( the GI Bill) that he would enjoy, after his return from duty in 1948, a brief training in photography, at the School of Industrial Arts, in a program designed for former soldiers. 
He didn’t need more to consider himself a photographer. He created his own “photographer” stamp that would adorn the backs of pictures of storefront he tried, in vain, to sell to the shopkeepers of his town. This rejection drove him, starting 1970, to work on landscapes. As Christian Caujolle would note in another catalog entry, “With rare freedom and manic determination he deconstructed and reconstructed the outdoors.” 
To rebuild, no need for special equipment (panoramics whose existence he undoubtedly ignored) but an ordinary camera, medium format prints processed at a local store ( as visible on one of the exhibited “panoramics”), infinite patience, scissors and lots of cellophane tape. 
Christian Caujolle adds: “the result is at once unsettling and unusually comfortable: viewers are projected into the landscape – sometimes at 360° -- and are obliged to contemplate them while the distortions, in an elegant variety of curves, offer a definition of who we are, how we see ourselves, but we never fully succeed. 
If we are stunned by the manic care taken to connect the pictures, by the need to provide continuity and fluidity, we are also stunned by the seeming lack of crude props, by the impression of calm, serenity, and vastness through this imposing collection of more than 200 color panoramas. It would be fair to evoke panoramas rather than panoramics in as much as the internal rhythm is essential to the construction of so many pictures and the pictures are far from rigid, despite their precise structure…” 
We can’t say if his parents encouraged his work. Did he or his parents refer to them as creations? If not, why keep secret these land and cityscape reconstructions? Albert Moser never did try to show them, let alone exhibit them. He kept them rolled up, hidden at the bottom of a bag, in his room. They would have existed only for him, had it not been for a series of circumstances that allowed them to surface and be revealed to the public. 
The exhibition at the Christian Brest gallery offers, for the first time in Europe, a large selection. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalog (French/English) of 208 pages with texts by André Rouillé, Christian Caujolle and Philipp March Jones. The gallery produced a limited printing of 250 numbered copies.

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Albert Moser - "Life as a panoramic"
Until July 20th, 2012
Galerie Christian Berst
3-5 Passage des Gravilliers
75003 Paris
+33 (0)1 53 33 01 70
contact@christianberst.com
Mardi-samedi 14-19h