6th Art Brut biennial: Faces

Our face is what makes us unique. Its features and expressions convey everything about us: body and mind. To deprive us of the face’s demonstrative power, even partially, is to leave us feeling dismembered, as if we’ve lost a part of our humanity.One way to think about the face is to consider its role in communication. After all, the gaze has a certain potency - we know what happens when two people’s eyes meet, and how children build their sense of self by observing the facial expressions of those whose role is to nurture them.But the face also serves another, more contradictory purpose: it is the visible surface of what lies hidden inside us. It both reveals and conceals our thoughts, our feelings, our concerns and our emotions.The face therefore merits exploration through an anthropological lens. For art brut - a form of art whose existence is driven by creative necessity - this exploratory exercise takes on a distinctive character: no matter how socially or culturally marginalised their creators, these works, with their figurative undertones, compel us to look long and hard at what it is that makes us human. These faces - some attentive, questioning, searching or communicative, others blank, vacant or withdrawn - capture the way in which we relate to the world around us, forcing us to question, through a type of mise en abyme, our inherently personal experience of humanity.