In Lausanne, the Collection de l’Art Brut invites you on a new journey to Cuban lands, following in the footsteps of a first exhibition imagined in 1983. “Art Brut Cuba” presents 266 works, drawings, paintings, collages, assemblages, adornments and photographs until April 27, 2025.
How did Cuba, one of the poorest and most closed-off islands, become a fertile ground for self-taught artistic creation, that of marginalized people who create as it comes to them? This is the question that the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne is asking and exhibiting through a new exhibition entitled “Art Brut Cuba”.
Part of the exhibition tells the story of friendship, in the 1970s, between the creator of art brut, the painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), and the Cuban artist Samuel Feijóo (1914-1992) who collected and published in a magazine the creations of autodidacts, already exhibited in Lausanne in 1983.
An art far from the usual Cuban imagery
Forty-one years later, the museum returns to the event by bringing together a selection of drawings and paintings by these historic creators. Added to this are works by contemporary Cuban artists presented for the first time, promoted by the Riera Studio in Havana, which the director of the institution Sarah Lombardi discovered during a trip to Cuba in 2017.
Through the themes represented, the creators echo their experiences, economic, social or political realities, their inner worlds and obsessions. All very far from the usual Cuban imagery, which still remains mainly controlled by the State. “What strikes me, as always in art brut, is to what extent the artists manage to imagine, to develop an artistic language which is totally unique for each of them,” explains Sarah Lombardi in the 7:30 p.m. December 5.
If the fact of recycling or diverting makeshift supports or discarded objects for creative purposes is one of the characteristics of outsider art, it manifests itself in Cuba even more than elsewhere: the artists of which it is question lack almost everything.
Overflowing imagination and ingenuity of Cuban artists
Their boundless imagination, their ingenuity and their need to create allow them to exploit, transform and divert materials of all kinds, in order to create unique works of great expressive force.
Sarah Lombardi finds the work of Lazaro Duran particularly interesting, in which “each drawing is a television screen. You should know that for a long time in Cuba, families did not have color televisions. They therefore painted the television screen to give color to the black and white screen and we see images that refer to politics, society, variety. The artist works with illustrated Soviet propaganda magazines. criticism and in any case, all these marginal authors have no visibility today in Cuba.”
Entitled “Wandering souls”, an exhibition by photographers Lorenzo Valmontone and Thomas Szczepanski completes the discussion. It highlights the world of four artists presented in “Art Brut Cuba”.
TV subject: Gilles de Diesbach
Web adaptation: olhor with ats
“Art Brut Cuba”, Collection de l’Art brut, Lausanne, from December 6, 2024 to April 27, 2025.
