Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or (France) (AFP)
Apocalyptic UFO installed for 20 years on the borders of Lyon, the Demeure du Chaos, private museum of the businessman and iconoclastic sculptor Thierry Ehrmann, challenges the visitors as much as it irritates the elected officials of the municipality which houses it.
At the sight of this property of 9,000 square meters located in the heart of the posh village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, about ten kilometers from Lyon, the visitor is immediately captivated by the blackened walls and stained with portraits and libertarian inscriptions, announcing inside a "republic of chaos".
Behind the doors, "another world", that of Thierry Ehrmann. The 57-year-old artist, who made a fortune by creating Artprice, the world's leading information provider in the art market, has for 20 years fashioned an unusual open-air museum of more than 6,300 works - almost exclusively his.
Debris of painted nuclear aircraft and nuclear submarines, video installations, reconstituted bunkers, diverted electrical machine tools and transformers, giant skulls or vanities, monumental raw steel fixtures ... The whole offers a vision as crazy as fascinating .
Reached by a neurodegenerative disease that gives him "extraordinary creativity and strength", Ehrmann sees in the Demeure du Chaos "the reflection, the mirror of the world".
A burgeoning world, where rusty metal sculptures sit side by side with extracts of Dadaist and Situationist manifestos, Chinese ideograms and hundreds of rock-stained portraits of artists, rulers, dictators, terrorists, or philosophers from five continents, who plunge the visitor in an endless guessing game.
"In this Demeure du Chaos, we come, we touch, we experience thousands of works that I have created for almost 35 years as a sculptor", explains to AFP Mr. Ehrmann, always present when the museum s opens to the public.
Through this contact, the artist intends to "reinvent the museum journey, in which people can exchange, live, breathe, and I believe that today, between the public and the artist, there must be communion, "he continues.
An avid internet user, Mr. Ehrmann measures the popularity of his museum on the web, where more than four million notices were registered on social networks. The museum attracts every year no less than 180,000 visitors, a feat for an establishment that is open only the weekend, the afternoon.
- Archival mountains -
Mr. Ehrmann's very strange home is also home to the headquarters of Artprice, world leader in the art market, and the server group, a pioneer of Internet data banks.
In offices with walls covered with portraits and works by the artist-entrepreneur, dozens of employees index, list and refer data around the world, in relation with their colleagues based in New York and Beijing.
And in the heart of the central building, are archived more than 750,000 sales catalogs dating back some in the 18th century, constituting one of the largest funds of the world art market. In the basement, 900 servers are installed in clean rooms. Some of these computers, installed in steel tubes, are immersed in a reserve of water to be cooled.
The museum also overflows into the private part of the buildings: the artist has completely walled his old salon, to protect himself from "gentrification".
"I say very often that I first lived in the Abode of Chaos and now she lives in me," he explains.
The singular remains contrasts with the scenery as picturesque as opulent Saint-Romain, a village of 1,200 souls, successive edifices have several times managed to condemn the artist to restore the outer walls in the original state.
But it holds good. He also won several battles in France and was able to bring his case before the High Committee of Human Rights to assert his right to freedom of expression.
"It is the wall of money and insolence that has come up against the Abode of Chaos." The well-meaning men tell us that this dwelling was perfect in industrial wastelands, in deprived suburbs. it's a monstrous hypocrisy.
Asked by AFP, the mayor of the village Pierre Curtelin, who judges this house "outlawed", did not follow up.
Pending a judicial outcome, Mr. Ehrmann is already immersed in new projects: the "total revegetation" of the House and its opening seven days a week, which he promises from the anniversary date of the place, Monday, December 9th.
© 2019 AFP