Art Brut y Naturaleza: de Ferdinand Cheval a Máximo Rojo

Abstract

This analysis takes as its subject the relationship established between outsider environments and nature. It begins with a brief introduction to art brut (outsider art) and the constructions that provide the focal point for this research study, which lie halfway between architecture and sculpture. It then discusses two specific examples in detail: Ferdinand Cheval’s Palacio Ideal and Maximo Rojo’s sculpture garden, both of which highlight the link between these creations and the environment, and the key issues arising from the revaluation of the habitat. The rationale for selecting these two cases is that two distinguishable landscapes were detected in comparing them: Cheval’s French countryside of the late 18th- to early 19th-century, from which he selects natural materials in the main; and Rojo’s rural world of the last decades of the 20th century, which are inseparable from overproductionand consumption.