effect of this sense of guilt in Western culture. Art 
performs a full revolution on the whole history of 
creativity, adopting as its own the animistic lan- 
guage of primitive art. 
"In their day, our antipodes of yesterday, the Im- 
pressionists were quite right to concentrate on buds, 
on the undergrowth of everyday appearances. But 
our beating heart thrusts us down, into the depth 
of the primeval earth. What then results from all 
this digging - call it what you will, dream, idea, fan- 
tasy - is to be taken seriously only when it is en- 
tirely dedicated, with the appropriate figurative 
means, to the act of artistic creation. Then those 
curiosities become realities, the reaiities of art, which 
make life a bit broader than it normally appears. 
Because they not only reproduce things they have 
seen with more or less temperament, but they make 
visible things that were discovered in secret" (Paul 
Klee). 
So, in the awareness of his own minority with re- 
spect to the brutal and banal majority of the visi 
ble world, the artist adopts, as his way of being, 
the style of emphasis that is able to sound the 
depths; a process of psychological dilatation, 
through the adoption of craftsman's techniques 
that cannot fail to call to mind the Middle Ages, for 
the religious identity of art and primitive languages, 
suitable to mark the sentimental emergency of a 
subject denied in its totality. The craft techniques 
of image reproduction, such as woodcuts, restore 
the unity of the production process undermined by 
the advent of the machine, which tends to parcel 
out the work and standardise the product. The re 
covery of primitive art allows further modes to be 
introduced into the fabric of expressive language, 
giving new energy to a means and an alphabet now 
worn and threatened by the advent of mechanical 
techniques of reproduction. 
Brus's art replies to the artifice of these reproduc- 
tive techniques with the naturalness of craft pro- 
cedures and with the naturalness of a language that 
backs up the sentimental nature of the Creative 
subject, that seeks forms of expression that do not 
paralyse but are rather flexible and in harmony with 
its needs. 
The artist responds to the anaemia of colourless re- 
ality with the representation of another illness, that 
of exuberance, through which to compensate the 
overbearing disproportion of quantity. The incan- 
descent temperature of the work shows him how 
art is a procedure that, while adopting its own in 
ternal rules and specific languages, creates breach- 
es in the opaque of everyday life and introduces a 
different way of viewing the world. 
The anti-naturalistic view of the world is indeed the 
Symptom of a mentality that does not compete with 
the appearance of things, but offers itself as a com- 
plete alternative, in a striking radical contrast. A 
state of hypersensitivity arms the hand of the artist 
who first plunges deep within himself, among his 
own instincts, and then reemerges in the sunny 
world of form where everything becomes represen 
tation and nothing is left unsaid. 
The style of emphasis gives continuity to this pro 
cedure, gives a voice and information to that which 
would otherwise remain interior and repressed, cre 
ates the possibility of an exchange, albeit with al 
tered tones, and represents a condition of impos- 
sibility that is not only of a social nature. The 
impossibility concerns the Dionysiac spirit, verging 
in exaltation even on the Statute of death, adopt 
ed by the artist who, by means of the strong Sen 
sation of creativity, alters the repetitive rhythm of 
standardised existence. Art is the only way of push- 
ing life towards a condition of impossibility, to un- 
mask its dead corners and inertia. 
The strong thought that runs through Brus's art is 
rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, of which he 
also adopts the fragmentary structure. Like the Ger- 
12