“Art does not come to lie down in the beds that have been made for it; it runs away as soon as anyone utters its name: it likes being incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it’s called.” Jean Dubuffet
Those who create Art Brut (Raw Art, in French) are free from all cultural conditioning or social conformity. They are inmates of psychiatric hospitals, loners, misfits, prisoners, marginalised people of every sort.
They create in a self-taught way, in silence, secrecy and solitude. And their ignorance of artistic traditions permits them to produce work that pushes us back to our essence as human beings.
Because, in spite of the isolation, there is a scream that resounds, pure and raw, in our cultivated silence. A call that everybody can hear. In a language we all understand. An appeal to a very intimate, shared sense of compassion. An impulse to revolution.
