CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Faux Naïf
Deliberately childlike or untrained-looking painting by skilled contemporary artists, using simple drawing, flat colour and odd scale.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Faux Naïf are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Faux naïf, French for falsely naive, describes trained artists who choose to look untrained. Jean Dubuffet painted in a crude, graffiti-like manner in the 1940s, and many earlier painters admired the directness of self-taught artists such as Henri Rousseau without sharing his innocence.
Contemporary painters use the same means for different ends. Yoshitomo Nara draws large-headed children with sly or defiant expressions, mixing cuteness with menace. Tal R builds paintings from bright, lumpy shapes and cheerfully clumsy drawing. Jules de Balincourt paints flattened maps, crowds and landscapes in a manner closer to a sign painter than an academy. Craigie Aitchison reduced crucifixions, dogs and portraits to a few shapes on luminous grounds, and Joe Bradley has made paintings of crude, cave-drawing-like figures. Look for wobbly lines, ignored perspective, figures scaled by importance and colour applied with apparent innocence, along with the knowing intelligence behind it.
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