JEAN DUBUFFET (1901-1985)

Executed in 1979 and held in the same private collection since the following year, Site habité is a stunning example of Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated series Théâtres de Memoire. Begun at the close of his twelve-year cycle l’Hourloupe, which reimagined the physical world, the Théâtres de Memoire instead turned inward, the visual manifestation of Dubuffet’s enduring fascination with mental landscapes. The series title refers to Dame Frances Yates’ 1966 publication The Art of Memory, which traces the history of mnemonic systems. In these works, Dubuffet gave image to the ways in which memory affects one’s understanding of the everyday world. In composite assemblages of cut-out paintings and drawings, Dubuffet incorporated elements that recalled his previous tableaux: the graphic forms of l’Hourloupe, for example, the frenetic patterning of the Paris Circus, or the curious portraits he created during the 1950s. These works offer a vivid summation of Dubuffet’s belief that the mind creates its own reality. Created towards the end of the artist’s life, the series was totemic for Dubuffet, an archival act rendered in vibrant, animated colour. A gallery of this year’s exhibition Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty at the Barbican Centre, London was dedicated to works from Théâtres de Memoire.

The all-over composition of Site habité offers no linear narrative or clear start; instead, the figures seem to exist within a surreal, fantastical world where disjunctive conversations and haphazard encounters govern all and each takes place in an isolated frame. Colourful hatch-marks and calligraphic lines suggest the bewildering or hallucinatory dreamscape which threatens to dissolve into chromatic formlessness. Indeed, under Dubuffet’s hand, memory is not a clear image, but rather a kaleidoscopic field of chance  resonances. As the art critic Gilbert Lascault wrote, ‘The Théâtres de mémoire attack habits, attack notions pulled from the dictionary. They insist on confusion, on the richness of our perceptions. They underline the instability of things’ (G. Lascault, ‘Autour des théâtres de mémoire’, 13 June 1978, in M. Loreau (ed.), Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Théâtres de mémoire, fascicule XXXII, Paris 1982, p. 189).