LAUSANNE.- "One of our civilization’s most awkward facets is the total separation operated between the order of the rational and the order of the poetic, whereas in all the so-called primitive civilizations [...], these are two closely united orders," asserted the ethnologist Claude Lévi Strauss.

The seven creators whose works have been assembled for this exhibition have maintained the original alliance enabling the two orders, the rational and the poetic, to live together. Their creations—recently discovered or rediscovered in Bali, Brazil, Benin, India, the Far North Arctic, Sicily and Germany—testify to a cosmopolitan Art Brut immersed in poetry.

Some of them cultivate sensitive links with nature and the cosmos, bending an attentive ear, in the manner of a Zen archer. Others assert that the celestial or astral powers accompany them, that they are guided by a god, by spirits, by their ancestors or by voices.

These creators of Art Brut, hailing as they do from a number of countries and continents, show a particular receptiveness; they have the sort of exploratory nature that invites reason to lose its grip, freeing them from reality. Thus we have the garlands of faces that enchant Ni Tanjung's nights, the paintings that tattoo the walls of Giovanni Bosco's town, the worlds of respectively Gustav Mesmer and Ezekiel Messou teeming with flying and sewing machines. Elsewhere, deities and spirits spring out from the shadows under the touch of Kashinath Chawan and Anarqâq.

Featuring works by: Kashinath Chawan (India), Ezekiel Messou (Benin), Ni Tanjung (Bali), Antonio Roseno de Lima (Brazil), Giovanni Bosco (Sicily), Anarqâq (Far North Arctic), Gustav Mesmer (Germany).