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AN EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY WORKS FROM THE ISLAND COUNTRY ALSO LOOKS BACK AT THE MUSEUM’S PAST FOCUS ON CUBAN ART

Published on April 7, 2025

by Edward M. Gómez

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND — With its latest exhibition, “Art Brut Cuba,” the Collection de l’Art Brut, the world’s leading museum focusing on the work of hard-to-classify, self-taught creators living on the margins of mainstream culture and society, has vividly captured la onda — the vibe — of one of the most intriguing, if little-known, art-making currents to be found anywhere today.

The Collection de l’Art Brut, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, was founded by the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who, in the early 1940s, began theorizing about and conducting research in the field he came to refer to, in French, as “art brut” (literally, “raw art”).

By the early 1970s, Dubuffet had amassed some 5000 items, including paintings, drawings, carvings, and mixed-media sculptural objects. Looking for a place in which to establish a museum dedicated to the study and promotion of art brut, he donated his personal holdings to the lakeside city of Lausanne, in the French-speaking region of southwestern Switzerland, which made a home for the artworks in an elegant château. Today, the museum owns nearly 70,000 works of art by visionary, self-taught artists from around the world.

Given its history, the core of the Collection de l’Art Brut’s holdings is rich in material from Europe. Over the years, the museum has acquired representative art brut works from many other parts of the world, too, including Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In fact, just as dealers and collectors who are involved in the specialized market for art brut and outsider art are always on the lookout for discoveries beyond these related fields’ historical-roots territories of Western Europe and North America, institutions concentrating on these same subject areas also have been expanding the geographic reach of their research and curatorial activities.

With these tendencies in mind, “Art Brut Cuba” arrives at the Swiss museum like a revelation from afar. Given that Cuba is a tiny country that, for many decades, thanks primarily to the United States’ economic and diplomatic blockade, has been relatively isolated on the international stage, this exhibition has the feel of an event that is unexpected and rare.

Curated by Sarah Lombardi, the Collection de l’Art Brut’s director, who began making research trips to Cuba in 2017, “Art Brut Cuba” demonstrates that, although the Caribbean island country that is its subject might be small, its cultural history has been rich and multilayered, informed by indigenous, African, and European sources. It suggests that Cuban art brut, which is marked by some distinctive formal-technical qualities and a powerful spirit, has emerged out of a complex confluence of social, cultural, political, and economic forces.

“[W]hy is this particular country deserving of our interest rather than another?” Lombardi writes in an essay in the catalogue that accompanies “Art Brut Cuba.” This well-illustrated volume has been produced in a bilingual, French-and-English edition by the Collection de l’Art Brut in conjunction with 5 Continents, a Milan-based publisher.

Lombardi adds, “Because [Cuba’s] insular nature, its history and its territory — long isolated from the rest of the world for political and economic reasons — make this island, or so it can be assumed, a fertile environment for the production of creations unaffected by outside influences.”

The exhibition is divided into two main parts. Its first, historical section points out that, in fact, the Swiss museum’s relationship with Cuba dates back a long way. That’s because Dubuffet, who had become friendly with Samuel Feijóo (1914-1992), the founder, in Cuba, of the culture journals Islas (established in 1958) and Signos (founded in 1969), showed works from Feijóo’s personal collection at the Collection de l’Art Brut four decades ago.

Feijóo was a poet, writer, ethnologist, painter, and self-taught draftsman. As Lombardi notes in her exhibition-catalogue text, through Islas and Signos, Feijóo “presented the findings of his explorations in the realm of folk traditions and cultures, spanning everything from the graphic arts and poetry to literature and music.”

In 1983, the Swiss museum presented the exhibition “Art Inventif à Cuba” (“Inventive Art in Cuba”), which offered a selection of works made by more than 30 artists from Villa Clara, Cuba, all of whom were associated with Signos, a group Feijóo founded in the late 1960s. Now, the opening section of “Art Brut Cuba” recalls that earlier exhibition with a selection of drawings and paintings that were featured in it.

In addition to Feijóo, artists represented in this part of the exhibition include Isabel Alemán Corrales, Francisca “Panchita” Alemán, Alberto Adolfo Anido Pachecho, Armando Blanco, Benjamín Duarte Jiménez, Lourdes Fernández, Pedro Alberto Isés Díaz, and Cleva Solis.

These artists’ works lay the historical groundwork for an appreciation of the current exhibition’s second section, which is on view in “les combles,” the Lausanne museum’s large, loft-like attic space. There, a selection of contemporary art brut works from Cuba are on display. Their creators are all associated with Riera Studio in Havana, an independent art-making workshop and gallery.

Among them: Federico García Cortízas, Carlos Javier García Huergo, Josvedy Jove Junco (known as “El Siro”), Daldo Marte, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Duran, Dennis Yans Maza Tamayo, Miguel Ramón Morales Díaz, Ramón Moya Hernández, Boris Adolfo Martín Santamaría, and Damián Valdés Dilla.

The exhibition’s contemporary-works section also features an informative film chronicling the life and work of Héctor Pascual Gallo Portieles (1924-2020; he was known as “Gallo”), a former Cuban diplomat and spy who, during his retirement years, used a wide assortment of castoff objects and materials — typewriters, alarm clocks, radios, old vinyl records, and more — to create a site-specific art environment near his home on the east side of Havana.

Many of the older works on view in the current exhibition’s historical, Feijóo-related section still feel as fresh, unusual, and provocative as they must have appeared when they were originally displayed. Here, for example, paintings in tempera on paper by Isabel Alemán Corrales feature strange, organic forms — are they plants or mysterious animals? — with eyes tucked into their thick branch-arms that stare back unwaveringly at a viewer.

Equally bizarre are the drawings in India ink on paper of Alberto Adolfo Anido Pachecho, whose spindly black shapes with stringy embellishments bring to mind the kinds of images that were once conjured up by early-20th-century Surrealists. Haunting eyeballs also appear embedded in the black-ink fantasy figures of Pedro Alberto Osés Díaz, which might remind some viewers of the peculiar creatures that turn up in the pencil-on-paper drawings of the Iranian art brut artist Davood Koochaki (1939-2020).

Among the works made by artists associated with Riera Studio, colorful drawings in ballpoint-pen ink and wax crayon on paper by Federico García Cortízas depict otherworldly landscapes; in them, trees with explosive thickets of serpentine branches and sprawling roots fill each composition with suffocating energy. In Josvedy Jove Junco’s drawings made with similar materials, bare-chested figures with precisely rendered, full heads of hair stare out intensely. Sometimes, the artist’s female subjects have eyes on their exposed breasts. Meanwhile, Damian Valdés Dilla, also drawing on paper and using little more than ballpoint pens, creates detailed cityscapes inspired by and documenting his impressions of Havana.

As I point out in my own essay that appears in the “Art Brut Cuba” catalogue, a text that describes the broader, regional art-historical context in which the works on view may be examined and appreciated, today, in the Caribbean and Latin America, the concept of art brut, along with research in this field and the categorizing of relevant self-taught art-makers’ creations as art brut or outsider art, are still new, emerging phenomena. In Mexico, for example, the creations of self-taught artists and artisans are more likely to be placed in the “arte folclórico” (“folk art”) category than they are to be labeled as art brut or outsider art, even if they meet the criteria for being classified as such.

Dubuffet died in May 1985, almost two years after “Art Inventif à Cuba” closed at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Writing in the preface of the “Art Brut Cuba” catalogue, the museum’s founding director, Michel Thévoz, who knew the French artist well and, over the years, has served as one of the most articulate presenters — and analysts — of Dubuffet’s ideas about art brut, points out that makers of folk art tend to recreate familiar, tradition-established forms. By contrast, Thévoz writes, “In Dubuffet’s opinion, art brut — the complete opposite of such mimicry — is distinguished by hyper-individualism and freedom from social conditioning.”

Thévoz continues: “If this contrast were to be shown in a Venn diagram, folk art, and art brut would be depicted in separate circles. But in Cuba, the circles overlap […].” That’s because, in Cuba, art produced by unschooled art-makers that, moreover, is not created to conform with any government-mandated propaganda program or movement may be regarded as “arte popular,” a somewhat nuanced term that is hard to translate with precision. It’s one that is broad enough to accommodate both folk art and the unofficial productions of self-taught creators.

If a hint of this tension between what some observers might regard as arte popular, and others might recognize as genuine art brut may be felt pulsing gently through both sections of “Art Brut Cuba,” at the same time, it’s not really very important. What matters is the freshness and the inventiveness of the works on view. Art brut purists can be assured that they all emerged from the margins of mainstream Cuban society, such as it is and has been in recent decades.

As Derbis Campos, the co-director of Havana’s Riera Studio writes in the exhibition’s catalogue (trained in biochemistry, he oversees the photo-documenting, curating, and international promotion of the workshop-gallery’s artists’ works), “Entering into the complexity and uniqueness of each artist’s creative process is in itself a wonderful and always renewed sensory experience. On each occasion, revisiting these works is a process of feeling new emotions, interpreting the emotional states of their creators, becoming aware of previously unnoticed details, and contemplating the intrinsic beauty of aesthetic diversity.”

¡Viva el arte de Cuba!

Art Brut Cuba, published by the Collection de l’Art Brut in conjunction with 5 Continents, contains texts by Michel Thévoz, Sarah Lombardi, Andrea Dal Lago, Edward M. Gómez, Derbis Campos, Samuel Riera, and Rosmy Porter. The book can be purchased from the museum’s website, here.

[Scroll down to see more images related to the “Art Brut Cuba” exhibition.]