LAUSANNE.- Launched in 2013, the Art Brut Biennials continue this year with the Architectures exhibition presenting two hundred and fifty drawings, paintings, sculptures and textile creations. By fifty-one different Art Brut authors, the works on show thus testify to a very wide range of techniques, materials, dimensions and formal languages.

This second edition biennial highlights architecture: it presents a range of works—some of which have never before gone on display—exclusively focused on the theme of construction. Showcased side-by-side, representations of houses, buildings and cities, together with floor plans, elevations of facades, cross-section and perspective views are invited to dialogue among themselves. Their Art Brut authors have rejected all the geometric constraints and demands of convention ordinarily governing architectural drawings, diverting the laws of perspective in favor of their own, highly personal interpretations.

In the course of their frequently troubled life paths, many a time Art Brut creators find themselves relegated to a site that is not of their choice. The likes of, for instance, psychiatric hospital patients, prison inmates and migrants may experience their living place in unfamiliar or even hostile terms. Some feel a need to reclaim their surroundings by projecting on paper their personal ideal of an architectural project, seeking to arrange, conceive and illustrate a fantasy world of their own. Each Art Brut architectural contribution thus expresses either its author's version of reality or else his/her manner of representing a utopian world. Yuji Tsuji draws his city as seen from the sky: the results are staggeringly precise, if devoid of any human figures; Gregory Blackstock comes up with a whole range of forts, huts and skyscrapers to complete his encyclopedically compiled universe; Willem van Genk reinterprets his views of various capital cities that he either has visited himself or studied in the many tourist guidebooks he collects. Meanwhile, Magali Herrera invites us to visit a fantasy world springing forth from the pages of the science fiction novels she secretly wrote in Uruguay during the 1970s.

The overall vision of architecture conveyed by these Art Brut creators is thus imbued with a whole new dimension—that of escaping their daily reality.