The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne is trying to create a dialogue between art brut and comics in its new and exciting exhibition. The common points between the two modes of expression are finally more numerous than one could imagine.
“This is the first time to our knowledge that an exhibition has brought together art brut and comics in a museum,” said Sarah Lombardi, director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, during the presentation Thursday to the media. . Until next February 26, 270 works by 32 artists, 75 of which come from the collections of the Lausanne museum, are to be discovered, for as many revisited or fragmented forms.
At first, everything seemed to oppose art brut and comics. On the one hand, a very free and solitary art not caring about pleasing the supposed tastes of the public, on the other, a popular art with a codified language, whose heroes are often icons of a declined mass culture on multiple media, summarizes Erwin Dejasse, Belgian curator of the exhibition, art historian, comic strip specialist and researcher at the Free University of Brussels.
Coexistence of image and writing
“Getting past these antagonisms, I actually realized that art brut has an ultra-present narrative dimension, where the image and the writing coexist enormously”, he explains. While 20th century art has largely emancipated itself from the narrative, in favor of formal research or conceptual approaches, many works of raw art indeed show that images retain all their capacity to produce narratives, according to the commissioner.
“I have also observed that many creators of art brut have taken over the imagery and codes of comics, remodeled them freely to integrate them into their imaginations”, he says. “Comics and art brut share a heterogeneity of signs and codes, whether they are texts, images, frames, onomatopoeia, speech bubbles or pictograms”, he underlines.
“Both of them somehow break the boundary established between the visible and the readable”, adds Mr. Dejasse. In the end, the observation is clear for him: the common features between these two fields of expression are rich and multiple. “The idea was therefore to explore the links between the two, to make them talk to each other, to play on their interconnections”, says this comic book enthusiast.
Narrative and visual audacity
It is therefore this fascinating encounter between two arts that are closer than we thought that the Collection de l’Art brut offers on the ground floor of the museum. The public is invited to discover artists and creators with abundant narrative and visual audacity.
The visit begins with works close to the classic canons of comics and ends with those that are furthest removed from them. Some therefore take up the structure in boxes, but others completely destructure them.
Far from the notebooks of the American Frank Johnson, in the tradition of the comics of the 1930s, the exhibition ends with the visual explosions of the Japanese Yuichi Nishida, in which we can hardly discern the codes of the manga, deployed on a single immense image drawn in one to two years.
Poetry, fantasies and utopias
In between, the visitor’s gaze will rest on unique paintings with multiple scenes, works with an unbalanced occupation of space, texts fluttering around Fauvist images, unusual tree-like or superimposed narratives, drawings inviting circular, wandering or random readings. Other works take the counterpoint of comics, fixing the immobility and the petrification of time.
All these productions offer a wide variety of registers and themes: poems in images, epic stories, chronicles of daily life (especially in psychiatric asylums), traumatic testimonies, fantasized visions or even utopian universes.
This article has been published automatically. Source: ats