Una linea visionaria. L’Outsider Art tra storia e linguaggi contemporanei

Abstract

In the historical scenery, the Outsider Art was not born in antithesis with the original definition of Art Brut, representing, on the contrary, its anglo-saxon declination, as declared by the same inventor of the formula, the art historian Roger Cardinal. Hence, a notion that means to preserve, today again, the same ingredients wanted by Jean Dubuffet: a fresh and instinctive art, wild and “mad”, free from the cultural mimicries, those of “the chameleon”, as Dubuffet loved to remind. The same ingredients that fascinated, back in the XIX century, the first critics of this art, born within the walls of the madhouses: the psychiatrists, ready, in the Twenties, to change their view, digging a deep furrow with the positivist anthropology and with the use of the only psychopathological language in front of the image. A long adventure, immersed in the positivist climate, that addressed the research toward a new world: in fact, a red thread linked the attraction for the exotic to the fascinating otherness of the artistic “madness”, the formal extra-european synthesis to the “innocent eye” of the child, to whom was attributed, in this new mythical horizon, the ability to produce uncontaminated images, a result of a superior vision.