The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne is offering two parallel exhibitions highlighting the works of Friborg Pascal Vonlanthen and Bernese Clemens Wild. In addition to their nationality, these two artists have in common that they are currently working in a creative workshop, and that they create a close dialogue between writing and image.
Suffering from fragile X syndrome, Pascal Vonlanthen was born in Rossens, on the family farm 67 years ago. Although his intellectual disability never allowed him to learn to read or write, he has a passion for writing. “As a teenager, he had entire notebooks of signs and drawings that he took with him,” said exhibition curator Teresa Maranzano during the press visit on Thursday.
Pascal Vonlanthen began attending the Friborg differentiated art workshop CREAHM in 1998. At that time, he devoted himself to the representation of farm animals, often stylized, which “float in the composition or are aligned like a sort of “figurative writing.”
Clouds of letters
About fifteen years later, writing resurfaces in his work. One day, he was inspired by a free daily newspaper that he reappropriated. Writing becomes a dominant element in his art. “Sometimes, a word is recognizable, but very quickly the writing becomes abstract, undulatory, similar to a flight of starlings, then freezes,” observes the curator. “Sometimes volumes or resurgences of animal forms are mixed in.”
The Fribourgeois’s “asemic writing” made headlines in 2017, when New Yorker Jason Wu, known as Michelle Obama’s stylist, took inspiration from it for a clothing collection. Despite this international success, “Pascal Vonlanthen continued his creation, imperturbable like Forrest Gump,” smiles Teresa Maranzano.
“Ken Loach of Art Brut”
Born in Bern into a family of booksellers, Clemens Wild, 59, was “bathed in books and the love of art” from a very young age. Despite vision and speech problems due to a difficult birth, he mastered writing and “imagined fictional stories at a very young age which he wrote and drew in comic strips”.
His work exhibited at Art Brut focuses on the “gallery of women with battered destinies, but dignified and without complexes” that he draws and to whom he gives voice on Kraft paper or paper bags. These imaginary female characters who “share humble professions, a precarious social position and distant origins”, while maintaining ambitions and hobbies, were inspired by the women he has worked with for more than 40 years at the Berne Humanushaus foundation. .
“Each one has their own personality, with extraordinary clothing choices, even if it’s just work clothes,” points out Teresa Maranzano. Clemens Wild has an “incredible chromatic skill and manages to bring out these people invisible by society”, continues the curator who sees in him a sort of “Ken Loach of Art Brut” through his view of society and his speech on marginalization.
International meetig
Several events are planned alongside these two exhibitions, to be seen until October 27. An international conference, on September 30, will focus on creative workshops as potential new sources of art brut, a meeting with Clemens Wild will take place on October 10, while several workshops intended for children will take place from the end of June .
This article was automatically published. Source: ats
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