Hey !

Janko Domsic was, among many other things, a demiurge, a builder, an organizer, and an artist. It was in his makeshift dormitory not far from the Montmartre cemetery, in Paris, that this Croatian exile made his celestial compositions, filled with religious political and Masonic symbols. “My writings are coded.” His drawings, like the texts that accompany them, respond to a very elaborate system. Magnified in the exhibition Art brut, works of the Antoine de Galbert collection, in 2015, at the maison rouge (Paris), his pieces appear in all the major world collections, both public and private, of art brut.

This artist seems as if straight out of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. An accordionist in bal musettes, France’s old-fashioned popular dances, he worked the rest of the time in a factory. In the 1960s, when he settled in the Pyrenees, he began to draw his recurring motifs with coloured pencils: boats, cars, fish, hearts, etc. Keeping his drawings piled up at home, Joseph Vignes was finally discovered by the painter Claude Massé, who devoted an article to him in Fascicules de l’Art Brut in 1982. His work now appears in the collections of the LaM (Lille), Art Brut (Lausanne) and the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection (Manchester).

“Prophet” Royal Robertson spent most of his life in Louisiana with his wife and eleven children. Trained as a sign painter, his paranoid schizophrenia triggers his a prodigious creative fever. Ethereal ascents, portraits of deities, futuristic architectures alike “show houses” of a world to come, it is as if he had descended from his planet, carrying his own Tablets of Stone. Featured in countless international collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (USA) or the Musée national d’Art moderne (Pompidou), his work was presented in 2018-19 in the travelling exhibition Into The Unknown, produced by the Barbican (London) and curated by Patrick Gyger.

According to Ionel Talpazan, his drawings and sculpture of flying saucers contain secret information about the propulsion systems of UFO’s that could interest NASA.