Outsider Art: A phrase that is both intuitively obvious and irritatingly ineffable. Initially, it was the title of a 1972 book about the Dubuffet Art Brut collection written by Roger Cardinal – an erudite English writer with a passion for unconventional art, a central figure of this scene who sadly passed away recently. In this first issue, there is a previously unpublished interview he gave us a few months ago. In it, he takes no issue with the fact that everyone has their own understanding of what outsider art is. He did caution, though, that people should try to explain what they mean by it, lest it should eventually cease to mean anything at all. So let us try to explain what we mean. We mean both a family of artistic expression, equally far removed from the formal rules of academic art and the informal but just as potent tenets of contemporary art and its market. And we also mean a special way to approach art and to take it in: with one’s heart and one’s guts rather than one’s mind, with one’s raw sensitivity rather than one’s culture. A matter of the senses, not of sense, a sensual experience above all.

Outsider Art & Co, Editorial from Issue No. 1, February 2020