PIASA is organizing a sale of modern and contemporary art on Wednesday, December 7th.
For these landscapes, I liked blurring the scale so that it is unclear whether the painting represents a vast expanse of mountains or a tiny piece of land. Some are purely physical: they evoke places, terrains, or even basements, in a very concrete way without any mental divagation...
But the matter, in the continuation, became complicated at times... The numerous experiments that I made about these paintings sometimes led to bizarre aspects, where the false was mixed with the true, and where the landscape took an absurd air rather than a real place or real material, becoming some kind of aborted or unfinished creation...
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
Paysage tavelé aux arbres, 1954
Estimate: 120000 / 150000 €
The rational was mixed with the absurd in this painting, creating many ambiguous forms. They can strike the viewer of the painting, either as reliefs or accidents of the ground, or as living beings (who live one strange life, halfway between existence and nonexistence, between the real and the imaginary, halfway between belonging to the places objectively represented in the painting or to only the mental world of the painter).
Jean Dubuffet, catalog of the exhibition, People are much more beautiful beautiful than they believe. Long live their true face. Portraits, Galerie René Drouin Gallery, 1947
