Art brut and comics

The Art Brut Collection in Lausanne will offer from September 16, 2022 to the end February 2023 a beautiful exhibition on the theme of “raw art and comics”. This exhibition, curated by Erwin Dejasse, will have the following characteristics: desire to highlight the intimate links between writing and image in the works Art Brut, by bringing together various works that are related in one way or another other than comics. To accompany this exhibition, a catalog bringing together around 150 color illustrations by around thirty artists (including Henry Darger, Daniel Johnston, Jean Leclercq and Dominique Théate) will be published thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between the Collection de l'Art Brut and Atrabile editions. "Everything seems at first sight to separate Art Brut from the gang drawn. On the one hand, achievements generally produced away from the external views and, on the other, a form of creation that we associate often to its most popular heroes, icons of a mass culture declined on multiple media. However, many Art Brut creators have seized upon the imagery and codes of comics, remodeled them without shamelessly to integrate them into their own imaginations. The links between these two fields of expression are in reality rich and multiple; both share many common features that invite them to dialogue. While the art of the 20th century century has largely freed itself from narrative in favor of formal or of conceptual approaches, countless works of Art Brut show with eloquence that images retain all their capacity to produce stories. On the other hand, comics and Art Brut also have the particularity of breaking the boundary established between the visible and the readable – the drawing is read and the text looks at itself – while summoning a heterogeneity of signs: onomatopoeia, bubbles, collages or pictograms." (Text from a presentation by the exhibition by the Collection de l’Art Brut de Lausanne)