Jean Dubuffet, Mire G 95 (Kowloon), 1983. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.
Between February 1981 and January 1982, Jean Dubuffet produced 500 small paintings on paper without interruption. The artist retrospectively named these works Psycho-sites, a title that emphasizes their common theme: an indeterminate site — or place — inhabited by unspecific characters. In Site avec 6 personnages, as well as in the entire series, forms are blurred and decomposed. The spatial relationship between the various elements is erratic, creating a composition charged with disordered tension. The figures, with their primitive contours, appear to float in a delimited but abstract space.
Jean Dubuffet, Site avec 6 personnages, 1981. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.
In the introduction to Fascicule XXXIV of his catalogue raisonné, Dubuffet explains: “these [paintings] are ideas of characters who populate ideas of sites ... an enterprise aimed at escaping [from the reasonable], at freeing the figuration and hence the vision.” In that respect, the artist's cursive pictorial language aims to relativize the physical status of the Psycho-sites, thus highlighting their imagined status. Through these experimental compositions featuring bold colors Dubuffet questions our ability to see reality, and the rational framework with which we decipher the world. Do our eyes really see? Can we equate reality with the vision of things surrounding us? Is our desire to analyze our chaotic universe futile?
Jean Dubuffet, Mire G 95 (Kowloon), 1983. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.
In Dubuffet’s following Mires series which began in February 1983, the artist further extended his attempts to take a renewed perspective of the world. In Mire G 95 (Kowloon), the figures have practically disappeared, and the sites are left completely undetermined. Bordering on abstraction, the composition evokes nothing that can be strictly named. The large and the small, lines and curves, voids and volumes mingle, prompting viewers to forget “everything we have been taught to name.”
Dubuffet added the term “Kowloon” to the titles of his early Mires, a reference to the Chinese citadel destroyed in the early 1990s. Their bright yellow backgrounds are indeed reminiscent of bright Hong Kong store signs and Mandarin procession banners.
Jean Dubuffet, Dramatique X, 1984. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, London.
The Non-lieux paintings (translated as “non-places”) are Dubuffet’s ultimate series. Aiming to go beyond abstraction, the artist “questions the overall relevance of human views ... denies... that what we think we see... is anything other than fantasy, the ravings of our imagination.” As the artist states, his intention is to represent the non-being, a field of pure thought. The black background of Dramatique X evokes that empty space, and the reduced colour palette, made up of thick white, blue, and red curves, leaves more room for personal interpretation. The Non-lieux series occupied the artist until the dawn of his death in 1985, as an anticipation of his departure from the material world.
Jean Dubuffet, Lieu rouge au château, 1975. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
Rejection of established values and deconstruction of academic rules of art constituted the guiding thread of Dubuffet's work. Throughout his career, he drew inspiration from those who expressed themselves outside of formal artistic training — including graffiti artists, tattooists, patients in psychiatric hospitals and children — in search of a spontaneous, wild, and raw pictorial vocabulary. Site avec 6 personnages, Mire G 95 (Kowloon) and Dramatique X offer an exceptional panorama of Jean Dubuffet's last creative years. These works testify to the preoccupations that engaged the artist from his earliest artistic experiments and reveal how they have evolved over the years.
Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale >
Recommended Reading
Unreliable Witness: On memory and veracity in Rome by Luc Tuymans >
Forever Punk: Daniel Richter’s innate challenge of authority emerges in Schakal Reloaded >