The Outlanders : forging ahead with Art Brut.

Art Brut is not intended for museums or bourgeois parlours, but is instead a kind of creation that must be seen in its context, in other words in the senseless places where it was created, and by looking over the author’s shoulder. Each of these authors has already made a work of art out of their lives, for in each case their biography is a small novel. Mario del Curto leads us into the intimacy of this Art Brut. Drawn from his fifteen years of travels, he has provided us with an extraordinary photographic testimony to these exceptional personalities, these lonely, eccentric, asocial and shy artists, whose trust had to be earned. He approached them with patience, tact, sometimes with humour and the necessary intuition that was required in order to engender trust in their attitude and in their vision. He understood how to use the camera to finally stimulate expressions of feeling rather than simply suppressing them, for in contrast to the cynicism and voyeurism of the great reporters, his curiosity is based on an enthusiastic, friendly and at the same time trust-inducing viewpoint. This is therefore a photographic relationship in every sense of the word: the intensity of the view and the contemporariness of these persons emerge from the photographic situation itself and from the existential inclusion of the photographer.