art brut – Mitchell Pluto

Maps of Transformation by Tim White

Ancestor, February 2024. Cardboard, feathers and found materials.

We live inside a culture whose overriding goal is to keep us distracted, afraid, addicted and constantly triggered and disconnected from our authentic selves.

Snakes, ladders and chaos Tim White August 2025. Acrylic paint, oil pastel and paint marker on industrial paper

Art is an antidote, a map guiding us to an authentic lived experiences and a life-affirming revolutionary principle.

John Trudell, North American Indigenous activist, declared, ‘When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art’. In this context, of what therapist and medical doctor, Gabor Maté calls a ‘toxic culture’ the need for truth is critical and urgent.

The idea that art and poetry, and all the rich diverse forms of expression which connect us to each other can immunize us against the malignant virus of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy is deeply appealing. That this wisdom comes from the deep spring of Indigenous knowledge and resistance, and despite the ongoing depredations of colonialism, is compelling.

The broken bits of the world I collect and use: the scraps of paper, plastic and metal, the discarded and rejected materials are clues and tools helping me puzzle my way out of the colonial-capitalist labyrinth. They are medicines too, the materia of transmutation, which once distilled provide essential healing and deepened connection with the biosphere and all it nurtures.

As African American feminist bell hooks writes, ‘The moment we choose to love we begin to move against oppression’. This process of resistance, of healing through love, is an essential part of overthrowing the dismal and diminished life the masters of misery want to force on us. And it is from this love, from the sources within our imagination and in solidarity with others we can assemble a ‘new world inside the shell of the old’.

For me, the found and discarded objects and materials used in my art carry a promise and reminder of profound possibilities subsumed in everyday life beyond the superficial substitutions of a hollowed-out AI virtuality. That even everyday junk and detritus call out to be up-cycled and politicised demanding a place as emblems of a transformed future, and are always on hand as building blocks for a new world, is a source of joy and inspiration.

Listen like a rock. Sculpture and collage

©Tim White, November 2025

The Stormy Sea of Claudio Parentela

I am 62 years old and I live in Calabria, in the ancient Magna Graecia. I am harsh and solitary, wild, introverted, anarchic and autistically proud like my land, which is full of stormy seas, turquoise and crystalline seas, and rugged and desolate mountains, very colorful and rich in lakes and impenetrable woods. I have been painting, drawing, photographing, cutting, sewing, gluing professionally since 1995, since I decided that I wanted to breathe art every moment of my life.

I like to experiment with everything I have at hand,mixing incompatible, different materials in absurd ways. I like to scratch and dirty my photos. Sew them together and with my paintings. I like to sew my paintings endlessly.

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I never know what I’ll do, what of new or old I’m going to create. I don’t like to plan anything, I want things to happen as and when they have to happen, I don’t do anything at all…. I put on some music, maybe with a good glass of red wine…. I sit at my work table where I have all my colors, my beloved books, my photos, my colors….and the magic happens every time.

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After a while I start to draw dots, lines, knotted lines, I choose the colors….and so on….it’s wonderful what happens every time. It’s a continuous catharsis, a going inside myself, and always opening new doors to go deeper and deeper.

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To know, to discover and open parts of me that were sealed and that now by magic I was able to open and penetrate. Art has been my autistic way to be in the world, the only way I know and have to communicate my words, what I have in my mind and heart. It is the dance that I have chosen to dance in harmony with my breathing.

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It is my freedom, the freedom that is essential for me to live, to feel sincere and true. For the first 14 years of my ”professional” career I drew and painted only in black and white with rivers of ink and lots and lots of paper. I love black indian ink, and its thousand shades…..they are like the thousand shades of my soul, they are like the clouds that hide the faint glow of the moon….like the thousand thoughts that crowd the mind before it can choose the right word.

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I started drawing frantically and joyfully on many many zines and magazines from all over the world, I collaborated with noise, metal, industrial, techno music bands….did a lot of mail art…drew for everyone, everything. I have never stopped since then, obviously because I like it, because it is the job I have chosen, it is my life, the life I have chosen to live freely. I never stop looking for freedom in everything I do, it is essential to me. Art is freedom, dance, joy, pain, art is life.

The transition to color was an obvious, natural necessity, and collage too. Collage is an extraordinary bridge to and with infinite potential, it is a labyrinth, a puzzle that never ceases to amaze me. I love experimenting, measuring myself and having fun with everything that attracts my attention, it helps me grow artistically, to discover many new games.

My inspirations are many, many….. my beloved books, underground comics, fashion magazines, so much contemporary art, medieval and Renaissance art….Osho , Aurobindo and Mère, Sara Vaughan, Patty Waters, Evan Parker and Ornette Coleman, Can, Nicke Drake and Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell…. Diamanda Galas and Joel Peter Witkink…. many, much more… the laughter of my friends, the noises of the street, my beloved cats, the winter sea and mountain lakes.

…and of course the tarot cards….I have been studying, reading and painting tarot cards since I was a boy….I love them and I can’t stop studying them, contemplating them, collecting them. For the International Tarot Museum I have created 5 tarot decks and in these days I will start the sixth.
I hope and want to continue to create and be free as I am today

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Eric Capron’s Circus of Dreams

Eric Capron is a self-taught artist. He discovers the arts of the circus and the world of the puppet.

Eric Capron. Artiste autodidacte au parcours singulier. Dès son plus jeune âge, la dyslexie le marginalise. Enfant solitaire, il quitte très tôt les bancs de l’école et l’univers familial. Commence une vie de saltimbanque, découvre les arts du cirque, le monde de la marionnette.

Artiste en perpétuelle mutation. Dorénavant un travail quotidien permanent de production d’œuvres en papier mâché : des corps mis en scène. Des corps non genrés, incolores, sans modèles, mais étonnamment présents à nos regards amis. Ils existent pour eux-mêmes, d’abord.

Les sculptures sensibles d’Eric Capron racontent l’âme humaine, la fragilité de nos destins. L’artiste revisite les mythes fondateurs, puisant ses références dans la mythologie, l’art sacré et profane, l’univers onirique, les grands textes de la littérature.

« J’ai le sentiment d’être l’instrument de quelque chose qui me dépasse, une sorte de miracle, une boite de Pandore qui s’est ouverte…» nous confie-t-il.

Friction, macsiMe

macsiMe is a French artist who is inspired by impact. macsiMe prefers no elaboration. only the act of friction and reaction speaks for itself

All in Nothing-
Nothing in Everything
I draw
I erase
I glue
I scratch
I tear
I stop, look, look
And I start again
Lots of “I” s
but that is what Art is
Art is just answer

macsiMe lives in Le Mans, France
enjoys observing people
is inspired by action

_{THIS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT FROM THE ARTIST MACSIME}

Micro Seizures

Artistic studies in theurgic space, alchemical plants, time doors, cosmogramic beings, and artificial phantoms of intelligence. 4inx6in, collage on Canon film paper by Mitchell Pluto from December 1 to December 10

Pluto in Aquarius

we are Martians. Aries. Martians from Mars. Let me explain, Mars was like Earth and now since we forgot our origin, we innately burn through every place we live. our soil is sand and glass..we made the moon a clock. Iron shares a special relationship with our blood, a period of sixty seconds. the hour hand is a blade that takes time to trim a heavy circle into a lighter circle. meanwhile, it’s getting late. who really invites Ahura Mazda into their thoughts? the all-knowing one, unless it’s really about an ark with wings or the other curve floating by boat? or is the lost manuscript of Eratosthenes?

Pseudepigrapha is a mercurial ghost, everyone has a ghost story they believe in. George Lutz, a land surveyor, used the positions of points, distances, and angles to channel a much better story than I could tell. Those shapes he conjured made beliefs appear real.

and that’s as real as Sherlock Holmes sending Watson to kill Houdini. and definitely as real as Aldrich Ames misdirecting a whole institution into remote viewing.. but you know, the target gets paranoid and loses when the Chessmaster is late to the game. you know that, right?

What happened to the red bone marrow of giants, you know, the ones who built the pyramids, survived the flood, and were from mars? They must have burned the big foot bones. indeed here comes elimination by illumination, psychological warfare, and the second coming. The Exorcist worked by controlling everyone in the movie theatre by managing what the eyes saw. The eye is a sense of self. yes, the spooks were real and so was the contact lens in the possessed girl’s eyes..Shakespeare was accurate about the world and so was Timothy Leary, whoever controls the eyeballs controls the brain.

Featured photo The haunted footprint at Göbeklitepe/Potbelly Hill by Mitchell Pluto

_{©Mitchell Pluto 11/21/2022}

Psychic Theater of Jaky La Brune

I knew I was an artist when I realized that art was therapy for me. When I’m not painting I’m sad and angry. It has become a daily need to survive like… eat. Creation is for me a “vital outlet”, that is to say that I have to vomit the darkness that there is at the bottom of my guts so as not to sink while continuing to live with the people I love. It took me a long time to accept who I was. Today it is obvious. I eat, I shit, I paint and I sleep. I think that’s what being an artist is.

I have a lot of trouble communicating with others. I internalize everything so at some point it has TO EXPLODE ON THE CANVAS. To create, I draw inspiration from my own emotions and feelings that I can’t understand. Through the representation of the human body, I try to communicate these emotions. That’s why my paintings are very visceral: I have to dig into human bodies to see what’s inside.

You can then see in my paintings themes like identity, violence and love passion. Sometimes the spectators see monsters in my paintings but in my opinion, it is more about monstrous humans. It’s important to specify because it’s very different and it says a lot about the world in which we live.

I like to expand my pictorial universe on other supports. For a few years I have been sewing masks and costumes, and I have been doing performances. It’s as if my creatures in my paintings come out and become alive.

Cecily Brown is one of the artists I admire because she manages to find this balance between figuration and abstraction. In his work I see human bodies in motion but maybe my neighbor will see something else. I wish I could play with the viewer as well as she does. I love the idea of being able to inspire multiple stories through a single image.

_{written by © Jaky La Brune}

https://www.jaky-la-brune.com/

Pascal Manitoba Emergence of the Sunflower

An atypical course… Manitoba by its artist name lives and works in Biganos on the Arcachon basin. French international artist born in 1966 in Algéria, self taught psychedelic and visionary artist, began his career at 48 years old , he took a 180-degree turn and left his job as a chemist to devote himself to his revelation, painting. This total questioning allowed him to express his great freedom as an artist.

In the heart of the moment,
where time unravels,
At the heart of oneself, where no one
Others can go, build
Where to rebuild from nothing
What completes us
To just have to be
Fill this emptiness
Who fills the gaps
As long as we dare to share
Without hesitation without shading
As beautiful nature made us
In the blood fire
From our boiler
To happiness that fills us
The heart, like the child, the bird
Who paws and whistles the curious
Impatience of in body
To be surprised to be...
And drill
The mystery,
There where
transparent
The silence
Of between
The
Words...
To the life
In love

An artist, on the one hand in reaction to societal behaviors that paralyze many minds. But also to shake off this gloom and this funny habit that humans have to complain and believe that everything comes from outside …

Presentation in the sun
To the heliotrope thought
As we turn
Towards the star of light
I light the fuse
tinder, fungus
Trees, saprophyte
If any, getting rid of
Slag and other lures
Societal, for its petals
Get out of the futile, the straightjacket
Of what will you say
and leave the flower in the beak
Beat nature awakening
In and around you.
Let consciousness emancipate
Brillamos, a little, a lot
To insanity
the cat's paw Man
Live the emergence and cultivate our nature
And the one who welcomes us, a good vibe

Manitoba takes us on a journey through its colorful and spiritual universe where shapes and colors combine infinity. His art transmits passion and thirst for life, inspired by an original movement in the spirit of an ancestral memory, close to the primary arts. The artist invites us to the source, of all these lives around us and this natural song of hope that grows beyond borders and other forms of conditioning. A little shamanic, he invites us into the silence between the words, as if out of time, for a moment …

Riding the Beast with Delphine Cadoré

Delphine Cadoré French Outsider Artist born in Paris 1972

Immerse yourself in a universe where, under the gaze of the painter, the shapes come undone, round off and blend together. Guessing a fish that reminds us of the softness, the slowness, the fluidity of water.

The one where we all bathed, in the hollow of our mothers’ bellies. Meet the wolf, in all its guises: nurturer, progenitor, and also the least tender who ate the grandmother. A wolf, disturbing and comforting, like the passage of time; it swallows, digests and ends up carrying within itself lives and entire cities.

Discover, here and there, the bird, bearer of poetry. Light and soft, it soothes and lifts your head into the clouds. Then meet a woman who bathes in these waters, in this atmosphere of dream and creation. In this atmosphere where life explodes, the children clinging to the breast, and the vaginas still open from childbirth.

Delphine Cadoré offers us to discover her universe where metaphors rub shoulders with life, the real, the most visceral.

She paints in a powerful energy in which she embeds supports and techniques. She draws, inks, paints, coats, scratches, cuts… for the magic to work. And the magic works: we are caught up in the movement, and each canvas lifts us a little more into this universe of raw poetry.

I don’t consider myself an artist, I think that each of us is, but some have forgotten that, children are artists in their own right because they have retained this spontaneity that we later lack.

I have no real artistic influence, I like Francis Bacon as well as Paul Gauguin and many others, it’s quite heterogeneous in fact and I discover great artists every day via social networks. As a child, I had the chance to rub shoulders with many artists, illustrators, photographers, musicians, we lived in a community, so I think I always drew.

I am the mother of 4 children, two of whom are already adults and on their own, but I still have two little ones! it’s not always easy to reconcile my work and everyday life! I would say that what I miss the most is the time and above all a studio, a real studio!