ART BRUT | THE COLLECTION
Edited by Pascal Roman and Marco Décimo
The theme of the sixth Biennale de l’Art Brut (2023–2024) is faces, a distinctive feature of human beings, which, thanks to their expression, can encompass the complexity of the entire person—their body and their spirit.
The volume illustrating this important event hosted by the Collection de l’Art Brut invites us to reflect on the role a face can play in mediating communication through the gaze. We are all aware of how powerful it can be when eyes meet, as well as their crucial role in giving dignity to people through caring. But the face can also be considered from another, almost conflicting, point of view, as a visible surface masking the invisible aspects of the human being: it can either reveal or conceal feelings and emotions, thoughts, and concerns.
The subject of faces deserves to be explored here in all its anthropological depth. In Art Brut, its production marked as it is by a powerful creative urge, this exploration takes on a singular dimension, with the presentation of works whose figurative content facilitates the encounter with this inalienable aspect of humanity, which becomes somehow inevitable, regardless of the marginality of the social and cultural acknowledgement of the artists.
These faces, whose attentive, questioning, communicative, absent or empty, withdrawn or searching tone reflects a way of relating to the world, question, in a sort of mise en abyme, our own encounter with the human.
Pascal Roman is a professor of Clinical Psychology, Psychopathology, and Psychoanalysis.
Marco Décimo is a professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre and director of the Collège de Pataphysique.
Exhibition
Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
December 8, 2023 – April 28, 2024
