Jean Dubuffet

In The lost traveller, which belongs to his series of “Paysages grotesques”, Dubuffet is no longer depicting a landscape, since the pictorial medium of the crusty impasto applied to the large-scale canvas actually is the landscape, created by the manner of the paint’s modelling and the furrows and scratches gouged into the surface. The calamities of the twentieth century bring to mind the image of the human subject as a lost traveller. The work can also be interpreted as a comment on contemporary circumstances. Dubuffet’s experiments and theories bore a strong influence on European and American art in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1960s Dubuffet’s art signalled a radical volte-face. Abandoning his previous experimental use of materials and techniques, in his extensive “Hourloupe” cycle (1962–74) he sought to capture aspects of reality rooted in the imagination and invention. Exploring the swarm of lines, colours and forms in Virtual virtue, the observer’s eye finds nothing to latch on to: it slithers over patches of hatching, hops from one figure to the next and repeatedly trips over the grotesque visages of animals or men.

The three gnomic figures in Landscape with three personages are generated from the same basic forms, colours and hatchings as the spaces surrounding them. Dubuffet’s painting is a visual puzzle, a bizarre mental game, but also a play on the perception of three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional picture that he painted to challenge the ways we see ourselves and the world.