Many creators of Art Brut seem driven by a desire to reveal—or at least allow to surface—what remains buried within ourselves and within the world around us. Through gestures imbued with ritual overtones or by staging encounters with the departed, they open breaches into invisible realities and question the shifting boundaries between presence and absence. The artists brought together in this section demonstrate the extent to which revenants, ghosts, hybrid creatures, and monstrous beasts—those chimerical figures that populate our imagination—continue to inhabit our collective unconscious. Their persistence bears witness to the enduring fascination exerted on us by an otherness that is at once invisible and elusive.
A section that could just as well have been titled: “Conversations with Spirits.”