Demeure VI

Jean Dubuffet’s family were wine merchants in Le Havre, an occupation that he also plied for a while. In 1918 he moved to Paris to study art, and became acquainted with artists such as Juan Gris, André Masson, and Fernand Léger. It was not until 1944 that Dubuffet held his first solo exhibition. During this time he mainly painted primitive women nudes. Later he also made “portraits” of his friends, using a technique where oil paint was mixed with sand and gravel to add texture to the pictures. At the end of the 1940s he came into contact with the surrealists. He was also interested in art brut created by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and artists on the fringes of established society. Like the art brut artists, he wanted to create art that was liberated from intellectual pursuits, one that might seem primitive to some viewers. The texts he wrote about this art, however, testify to a keen intellect and a mind bursting with innovative ideas. From the 1960s Dubuffet painted a series of pictures that he called Hourloupe, where he limited his palette to black, white, red, and blue. He developed the series over twelve years, using various forms and media.

Demeure VI (dwelling) adheres to such a limited colour scheme. The composition resembles a graphically formed labyrinth of great complexity and detail, with a seeming hodgepodge of black lines formed as cells, some of them cross-hatched and coloured. It has been claimed that Dubuffet developed the idea for this type of art while sitting on the phone and doodling, letting the pen glide across the paper in a sort of automatic process, not unlike the methods of surrealism.