Fondation Guignard

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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 first edition. In 2024, the Fondation Guignard is proposing an exhibition showcasing works by four artists who work in two creative workshops for people with mental disabilities: CREAHM (Fribourg, Switzerland) and the BSB creative workshop (Bürgerspital, Basel, Switzerland).

Markus Buchser was born in Basel in 1959. He spent the first twenty-five years of his professional life working on a farm in the Swiss Jura and for nurserymen. In 2001, he joined the creative workshop (BSB Kreativwerkstatt) at the Bürgerspital Basel, a major Swiss institution. Right from the start, he developed an original visual language using a figurative syntax of his own invention. He is mainly interested in architecture and landscape structures, both urban and rural. In his artistic practice, he deals in a fragmentary way with personal visual and spatial memories, and interprets various buildings in his own way on the basis of illustrations or topographical models. Starting with sketches that combine multiple perspectives, which he calls his "plans", he develops a singular universe on canvas.

He also makes three-dimensional architectural models in cardboard, using adhesive tape and acrylic paint. His works are regularly shown in exhibitions. In 2023, he was one of the nominees for the Euward9 European Art Brut 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. Since 2009, Saladin's work has been regularly featured in exhibitions, including the 2023 exhibition "Lumbung brut - Art studio as a collective" presented by the Open art museum in St. Gallen.

Bernard Grandgirard was born in 1957 in the canton of Fribourg.Since 1998, he has attended the CREAHM workshop founded in 1998 by Ivo Vonlanthen, an artist from Fribourg, who based his work on a Belgian model created in the late 1970s by Luc Boulangé, an artist from Liège.This is where he comes to compose scenes, sequences and imagine perspectives.A concern for realism and an obsession with detail define the artist's compositions.He was the one who modelled the shadows cast by his subjects in small strokes.A virtuoso of shadows and spectacular relief, he grew up with stories of the Amerindians and knows John Huston's films and John Wayne's biography inside out. His work is a veritable plunge into the cinematic America of the last century: petrol stations, wide open spaces and big motorbikes on the way to the horizon, where all possibilities are born. He has taken part in various exhibitions in Switzerland, and in 2020, in collaboration with Fribourg artist René Walker, produced a short animated film entitled Un rêve extraordinaire.

Pascal Vonlanthen was born in Rossens 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, for the past ten years he has been tirelessly reproducing texts, scribbling words and knitting 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 January 2024, he was exhibited at Artgenève and awarded the Solo-Show Prize. In June 2024, alongside Clemens Wild, he took part in a major exhibition at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne.