With the Lieux de promenade (Walking Sites), painted in only a few days of intense work at the end of August 1975, Dubuffet experiments with the presence of landscape or site without the familiar figures which were his mark until then. A series of vertical paintings, 102 by 70 cm format (40 x 27,5 inch), brilliantly colored, constituted of a tangled mass of signs and spots announcing the famous Mires.
A couple weeks later, end of 1975, he develops this manner with the Paysages du Val-de-Marne (Val-de-Marne Landscapes), a set of 8 paintings of the same format, but this time they are horizontal. Figurative elements can still be found but they are rare: a few trees, a house, barely discernable in a mass of abstract graphics. In Dubuffet’s own words, one passes from, “immediate visual figurations” to denaturations due to whim”.
In the early 70’s, Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) has a new studio built at Périgny-sur-Yerres, in the Val-de-Marne, so as to follow his large-format sculptures’ making. Several times a week, he travels by car from Paris to Périgny, observing the landscape. These acrylic paintings are memories recreated in his studio of the sites he drove through, and thus seen from the artist’s moving car.
This series is complete. It has never been shown and will, for the first time, be reproduced in color for our catalogue.
As concerns the exuberant richness of these 1975 works, Gaëtan Picon wrote: “To the methodical organisation of the conquered space, as embodied by l’Hourloupe, succeed the random unfolding, and the off-hand inscription, of an accelerated time. Accelerated by the anxious impatience of convoking all, whilst there is yet time enough, so as to gather all – simplified, abbreviated – under his gaze? Perhaps. Yet I rather see it as an exit leap, the haste full of curiosity of he who favors meeting with that which has not – yet – had the time to occur”.
It is thanks to the Fondation Dubuffet, through its generous loans, that the Galerie Lelong & Co. can today present this as yet unshown series.
The catalogue published for this exhibition includes a bilingual text by Valérie Da Costa.
At the salon and the bookshop of the gallery: a selection of lithographs and silkscreens by Jean Dubuffet.
