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2024-Festival du dessin Arles
"Nouvelles figures de l'Art Brut" : a proposal from the Fondation Guignard. Exhibition
Art Brut has been on the programme of the Arles Drawing Festival since its inception. In 2024, the Fondation Guignard initiated a collaboration with the festival. The exhibition features works by artists working in two creative workshops for people with mental disabilities: CREAHM (Fribourg, Switzerland) and the BSB creative workshop (Bürgerspital, Basel, Switzerland). The works are selected by Michel Thévoz, the first curator of the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, and by Katia Furter. The Fondation Guignard is also one of the sponsors of the Arles Drawing Festival.
Markus Buchser was born in Basel in 1959. He spent the first twenty-five years of his working life working on a farm in the Swiss Jura and for nurserymen. In 2001, he joined the BSB Kreativwerkstatt at the Bürgerspital Basel. Right from the start, he developed an original visual language using a figurative syntax of his own invention. Markus Buchser is mainly interested in architecture and landscape structures, whether urban or rural. In his artistic practice, he deals in a fragmentary way with personal visual and spatial memories, but also with his own interpretations of buildings, based on illustrations or topographical models. Starting with sketches that combine multiple perspectives (his ‘plans’), Buchser develops a singular universe in his ‘combinations’ on canvas. He also creates three-dimensional architectural models using cardboard, adhesive tape and acrylic paint. His work is regularly featured in exhibitions. In 2023, he was nominated for the European Euward9 prize.
Ronald Saladin was born in Basel in 1964. In 1984, his parents opened a boarding house in Sweden, which became his second home. After his father's death, he returned to Switzerland. In 2007, he joined the creative workshop (BSB Kreativwerkstatt) at the Bürgerspital Basel. As he is aphasic, the interpretation of his drawings can only be hypothetical. Endlessly, like a seismograph, Ronald Saladin moves his pencil across the paper. The result is a tangle of lines in the shape of a knitting ball, which condenses into ever-new layers. Seemingly without beginning or end, the line takes over the paper, generating depth and temporality. Since 2009, Saladin's work has featured regularly in exhibitions, most notably in 2023 at the ‘Lumbung brut - Art studio as a collective’ exhibition presented by the Open art museum in St. Gallen.
Pascal Vonlanthen was born in 1957. He lives in Fribourg and has attended the CREAHM workshop since 1998. His figurative work has long been populated by farm implements and domestic animals. Although illiterate, over the last ten years he has tirelessly reproduced texts, scribbled words and knitted lines from newspapers, signs and instructions for household appliances. These drawings are currently his main body of work. Since 2012, his work has been shown regularly in exhibitions. In 2020 and 2022, he was a finalist in the Swiss Art Awards. In June 2024, alongside Clemens Wild, he will take part in a major exhibition at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne.
Born in 1957 in the canton of Fribourg, Bernard Grandgirard has been attending the CREAHM workshop since 1998. It's here that he comes to compose scenes, sequences and imagine perspectives. A concern for realism and an obsession with detail: that's what might best define the spirit of these compositions. Grandgirard was a virtuoso of shadows and spectacular relief. He applied his vast technical and cultural knowledge to the representation of log crossings or the hinges of a saloon door, as well as to the structure of a metal bridge. He knows the films of John Huston and the biography of John Wayne. He grew up with Native American stories. When asked about his drawings of photograms from Sam Peckinpah's film The Convoy (1978), he points to the emblematic ‘Angry Duck’ on the bonnet of the truck, a symbol of the spirit of adventure and the renegade lifestyle. He has taken part in various exhibitions in Switzerland and, in collaboration with Fribourg artist René Walker, has made a short animated film entitled ‘Un rêve extraordinaire’ (‘An extraordinary dream’).