Art Brut versus Outsider Art

The choice of the terms Art Brut or Outsider Art fully reveals the difficulty of simply defining a complex artistic field whose expressions are often paradoxical.

For abcd, the term Outsider Art, proposed by the British art historian Roger Cardinal, appears particularly problematic. It refers to a vision of the social body founded on the opposition between “winners” and “losers.” Yet this expression is far more than a clumsy translation of Art Brut: it designates a much broader field. Outsider Art indiscriminately encompasses folk art, naïve artists, visionaries, spiritualists, works by psychiatric patients, prisoners, homeless individuals, singular creators, artists associated with the Neuve Invention, as well as self-taught artists.

The concept of Outsider Art therefore seems to us both confused and reductive, insofar as it privileges an essentially sociological approach while obscuring the existential and ontological dimension of these works.

Art Brut exists on another level. It is conceived through theoretical tools better able to account for the richness of this art form, one permeated by a powerful spirituality. Indeed, most of these artists do not address us directly, but rather an alterity, a “higher” instance, a kind of matricial God, one might say. Their works unfold an infinity of signs and evocations without ever settling into a single, fixed meaning. The multiplicity of perspectives and the shattering of the boundaries of normative knowledge testify to another way of inhabiting and thinking the world, of writing other histories. The complex and enigmatic constructions of these works challenge us and often provoke a feeling of perplexity — that “uncanny strangeness.”

Of extraordinary richness, nourished by unconventional mental constructions, Art Brut explores the expressions of tormented souls. It invites us to abandon our usual points of reference and cannot be reduced to a mere object of sociological study.