Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)

'When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything around one with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects [of ordinary things]' (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973, p. 23).



Rendered in a rare multi-coloured palette of red, blue, yellow, white, black and Breton stripes on a large scale, Cuisinière à gaz I (Gas Stove I) (1966) forms an early and important part of Jean Dubuffet's signature Hourloupe series. Embarked upon in 1964, the series marked a decisive turn away from the conventions of contemporary painting, establishing a novel vernacular in celebration of the banal objects of everyday life. Approaching the subjects from distinct perspectives, Dubuffet's rendering of the simple gas cooker in brilliant colour and flattened two-dimensions recalls the paintings of contemporaries working across the Atlantic including: Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein undertaking their own vibrant colour homages to mass produced and commercial goods. Executed in 1966, Cuisinière à gaz I was exhibited at the end of that year in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's major retrospective of the artist's work held in New York.

In Cuisinière à gaz I, the artist has woven a simple gas stove into his composition, creating an abstruse and hermetically sealed puzzle of primary colours. For Dubuffet, the objective was not figuration, nor pure abstraction, but a novel mediation of the two, as articulated by the unschooled assembly of artists united under Art Brut. Cuisinière à gaz I is an important example of this work; a study entitled Cuisinière à gaz I currently exists in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, rendered in felt pen on paper.

The Hourloupe paintings originally began as a casual series of semi-automatic doodles drawn in red ball point pen during the course of a string of phone calls made by the artist. From the resulting pieces of paper, Dubuffet developed his own personal pictorial script, replete with flat, graphical cells and parallel hatchings in a narrow palette of colors; Cuisinière à gaz I is a striking example of this method. The image is a recondite composition that defies easy reading and rather commands the viewer's mental investigations of forms and shapes. Through this method, Dubuffet was initiating a novel subversion and redirection of the still-life tradition. Rendered flat and two-dimensional, with not even a glimpse of spatial differentiation, Cuisinière à gaz I creates a visually arresting but confounding picture.

In this respect, Dubuffet was drawing striking parallels with the artists of Art Brut, for whom imagery refers to 'another level of human discourse: that of the even monotonous flux of the irrational or pre-logical mind' (Ibid.). To Dubuffet, the importance of art was to express man's natural state rather than his cultured afterthoughts and as such to reject post- Renaissance figurative conventions of three-dimensional perspective space. As the artist concluded '...when one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything around one with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects [of ordinary things]' (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973, p. 23).