Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu have been working together as artists since the early 1990s. They are known for collecting art too, having focused their attention on many different fields. Sa Bassa Blanca, the name of their magnificent house, designed by Hassan Fathy in the north of Mallorca, is perhaps their defining masterpiece having become a sort of pilgrimage destination. There, you can view their work and their collections, either inside the house or in adjacent museum-like spaces and also scattered in a huge sculpture park. <\/p>\n
Insiders\/Outsiders?, the exhibition presented now at the Pal\u00e1cio de Cadaval, takes some thirty works by a group of Moroccan artists belonging to the so-called \u201cL\u2019Ecole de Essaouira\u201d, and juxtaposes them with another series of works, thirty or so again, by several Australian aboriginal artists. All the works on display belong to the Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation collection. <\/p>\n
\u201cL\u2019Ecole de Essaouira\u201d has its origins in the work of the Danish art dealer Frederic Damgaard, who moved to this city on the Moroccan Atlantic coast at the beginning of the 1980s. There he met Boujema Lakhdar, the first artist he worked with, and who soon introduced Damgaard to some of his friends. These were fishermen, carpenters or tradesman, who lived in the city or its surroundings and painted in their free time. Damgaard was soon had success in encouraging them, who have been spending the winters in Marrakech since 2011, to start to collect artists belonging to this group.<\/p>\n
The origin of Australian Aboriginal Art, on the other hand, can be traced back to 1971, when Geoffrey Bardon, a school teacher, encouraged some Australian artists to paint on canvas or board. His idea proved highly successful. Aboriginal culture goes back over 60,000 years, an incredibly long period in which they would paint on their bodies, pieces of bark and rocks. The use of canvas provided a transformative moment and nowadays there are thousands of practising Australian artists and hundreds of Community Art Centres where they can show their work. <\/p>\n
Arnaud Serval, a childhood friend of the son of Yannick and Ben, moved to Australia in the early 1980s, where he started to collect and deal in aboriginal art. Ben and Yannick became clients of his, and soon they owned works by some of the better-known artists of this movement.<\/p>\n
Visitors to Sa Bassa Blanca have been able to see works by the two groups of artists shown together, but so far there has never been an exhibition dealing with this idea, even if there are obvious connections. Both movements, to start with, were driven by the impulse of outsiders. They both started almost at the same time, and result from initiatives that may be described as social activism. It can also be said that there are some formal relationships between the art of both groups, such as the construction of densely layered, pulsating pictorial spaces, or the use of intense colours and expressive brushstrokes. In both cases, the landscape surrounding them is also important, being transformed in complex images that deal with inner emotions rather than an objective will of representation of the real. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu have been working together as artists since the early 1990s. They are known for collecting art too, having focused their attention on many different fields. Sa Bassa Blanca, the name of their magnificent house, designed by Hassan Fathy in the north of Mallorca, is perhaps their defining masterpiece having become […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-87","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n