While 20th century art generally broke free of narrative in favour of exploration of form and concepts, the creators of Art Brut draw on the codes of comic strips, eloquently demonstrating that images retain their ability to tell stories.
"Art Brut" and "bande dessinée": two seemingly irreconcilable French expressions. On the one hand, works reflecting the solitude of a practitioner indifferent to the supposed tastes of the public; and on the other, a creative style often associated with the public's most popular heroes, those mass culture icons in a variety of media.
However, many Art Brut creators have seized upon the imagery and codes of the comic strip, freely adapting them to their own imaginative needs. The links between the two are fruitful and numerous, with common features conducive to interaction. While twentieth-century art has largely emancipated itself from narrative, in favour of the formal or the conceptual, countless works of Art Brut eloquently show that images retain all their capacity to produce narrative. On the other hand, comics and Art Brut also share the particularity of a mixed bag of signs and codes - texts, images, frames, onomatopoeia, speech bubbles and pictograms; both break down the established frontier between the visible and the readable.
As author, publisher and critic Jean-Christophe Menu has it, alongside the book and magazine output of the traditional distribution networks, there exists a "left field of comics". Brought together from the Collection de l’Art Brut various institutions and private collections, these works offer an exhilarating plunge into this "otherworld of comics".
With works by: Denis Boudouard (FR), Luigi Brunetti (IT), Wouter Coumou (NL), Henry Darger (US), Hein Dingemans (NL), Karel Frans Drenthe (NL), Johann Fischer (AT), Alfons Frenkl (DE), Michael Golz (DE), Tomoyuki Hirano (JP), Vojislav Jakić (RS), Frank Johnson (US), Daniel Johnston (US), Jim Kaliski (BE), Johann Korec (AT), Katsutoshi Kuroda (JP), Gérard Lattier (FR), Jean Leclercq (BE), Pascal Leyder (BE), Jean-Jacques Liabeuf (FR), Andreas Maus (DE), Peter Mikolajewski (DE), Yuichi Nishida (JP), Aldo Piromalli (IT), Luciana Rossi (IT) Jean-Marie Roussillon (FR), Gustav Sievers, Kanako Tayu (JP), Dominique Théate (BE), Alfred Trouvé (FR), Oskar Voll (DE) et Clemens Wild (CH).
Curator: Erwin Dejasse