Art Brut
アール・ブリュット / 1945– / Style / Outsider Art
A concept framed to name work made outside art education and the art market, relying on nothing but a system of its own. Repetition filling the whole surface, private alphabets and sign systems, and the exhaustive reuse of materials recur across it. Less a style than the name for the conditions under which a style arises.
A surface filled with no margin left / Private systems of letters and signs / Exhaustive reuse of the materials to hand / A self-sufficient world built by repetition
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Publishing and exhibition design where the work's own visual logic has to be presented without being tidied into a house style · Identity for small labels, community projects and artist-run spaces that need to feel personal and unmanaged
- Type
- A hand-drawn alphabet used consistently, its own rules kept even where they are inconvenient.
- Composition
- Fill everything: no margin, no hierarchy, the field worked edge to edge at one density.
- Material
- Whatever is at hand and reused, ballpoint on envelope, thread, cardboard, with the reuse left visible.
- Caution
- Faking the naivety with a wobbly font and some scribble: the force of this work comes from a real and internally consistent system, and imitation reproduces only its tics.
- Further study
- Dubuffet's collecting and naming of it / The collection in Lausanne / Its English rendering as Outsider Art