in abstracto
#4
Until now, the notion of abstract Art Brut has been regarded, at best, as an oxymoron and, at worst, as a contradiction in terms.
Yet, provided one is willing to look at the works themselves rather than blindly accept the exclusions upon which Jean Dubuffet based his theory, the evidence becomes clear: many Art Brut works escape, in numerous ways, the figurative framework within which this field was long believed to be confined.
As Jeannette Zwingenberger points out, “The mystery of artworks lies in their autonomous logics. These constitute an autopoietic system: produced according to the conditions of their own intelligibility, the artwork establishes a world whose laws emerge from its internal organisation rather than from an external reference.”
Thus, abstract Art Brut, in accordance with the deep movement from which it arises, takes on the most diverse forms, and no fewer than 16 artists of both classical and contemporary Art Brut are featured in this fourth chapter of in abstracto.
All these visual manifestations bring us back to the very meaning of abstraction—an act of extraction and isolation—which calls upon us the necessity of imagination. For, as Gaston Bachelard wrote, “Imagination is nothing other than the subject transported into things.”
With the artists: Isabel Alemán Corrales, an anonymous French artist (late 19th–early 20th century), Jacqueline B., Beverly Baker, Jan Bratr, Franco Bellucci, Julius Bockelt, Giovanni Bosco, Anibal Brizuela, Marcello Cammi, Alexandro Garcia, Jill Gallieni, Joseph Lambert, Raphael Lonné, Ramon Losa, Albert Moser, Michel Nedjar, Leopold Strobl, Bjarni H. Thorarinsson, Henri Ughetto…
