Irony

I remember seing a Dubuffet exhibition and thinking, how he must have become fed up with what people expected from his art and then when he get really old, how he released himself of everything and fell in love with colour again, just like if he was a child again and starting over...








With his ironically cheerful imagery, Dubuffet lyricizes the material element, the small, neglected things of everyday life, the simple living of people, animals and nature.Thus, his paintings, in a way completely different from the later pop art artists who admired him, depict what is trivial. His art does not deride what is ordinary, but rather shapes the hidden poetry of everyday things into multifaceted image-compositions with multiple meanings.

The characteristic alternation in Jean Dubuffet’s painting between reality and dream, outer and inner experience, the ambiguity of his subjects corresponds to the position of this highly individual art situated between abstraction and representation.