Executed in October 1974, Site au ciele bleu avec personnage is an exemplary part of Jean Dubuffet’s most recognisable and enduring series. One of the longest and most celebrated cycles of the artist’s career, the Hourloupe paintings were first conceived in the summer of 1962 when, whilst speaking on the telephone, Dubuffet absent-mindedly produced a fluid line drawing in red and blue ballpoint pen on paper with his free hand while the other held the receiver. This subconscious, automatic drawing initiated what arguably became the artist’s signature. Throughout the Hourloupe series Dubuffet forged a new technique evocative of industrial design, employing a limited colour palette of blue, black, red and white, and the media most associated with graphic design: vinyl paint, ballpoint pen and marker. Site au ciele bleu avec personnage was created at the peak of the Hourloupe series and Dubuffet’s maturation of the technique. ‘L’Hourloupe’ is a nonsensical French word “whose invention was based upon its sound. In French, these sounds suggest some wonderland or grotesque object or creature, while at the same t.mes they evoke something rumbling and threatening with tragic overtones. Both are implied” (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 21). Dubuffet’s restless innovation and mining of new sources of inspiration placed his work as some of the most exciting and lauded of the post-war period. The present work is thus a seminal example of the artist’s best-known phase of expression, a period of Dubuffet’s career that takes centre stage at the ongoing and highly acclaimed Barbican Centre exhibition in London, Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty.

The Hourloupe series was executed across twelve years, encompassing paintings and sculptures featuring curved, biomorphic forms. The compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, exemplifying flattened, two-dimensional figures who appear to float on a background of pristine blue. While the shapes on the surface of Dubuffet’s Hourloupe are representational and referrential, their details remain deliberately elusive. The figures exist free of any specific location in t.mes or space. All sense of depth has been erased, as well as any sense of hierarchy of form within the image. Indeed, Dubuffet’s reduction of the human body throughout the series is highly reminiscent of the ground-breaking visual strategies employed by Picasso and Braque. Like those of his celebrated forebears, Dubuffet’s figures are visible from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. The geometric schema on the surface of the present work thus embodies Dubuffet’s homage to the Cubist masters, but also his own challenge to traditional spatial and temporal dimensions in painting.

With a sense of perpetual evolution and mutual communication, the abstracted, interlocking visual motifs on the surface of Site au ciele bleu avec personnage evoke at once the wanderings of the unconscious mind and an enlightened perspective free from ‘civilising’ and falsifying gestalts. Encompassing a highly automatic painterly language the present work is a test.mes nt to the artist’s radical art brut inspired style, and his enduring protest against conventional standards of beauty. Initially founded upon the lasting trauma of the Second World War, Dubuffet’s art brut syntax sought to elevate the strange, the outcast and the outsider over traditional academic methods. As the artist himself proclaimed, “Have we lost our joy in celebrating the arbitrary and the fantastic? Are we interested only in self-improvement? Would it not be legitimate, for once at least… to forget truth, to succumb to the vagaries of errors and pitfalls and to take pleasure in cultivating our function as drunken dancers?” (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Exh. Cat., Salzburg, Museum der Moderne, (and travelling), Jean Dubuffet, 2003, p. 14). In the Hourloupe works, the chaotic, instinctual sketch became a critical tool to bypass conscious creation, and Dubuffet sought to express the human mind’s most natural state rather than its cultural afterthoughts. In reflecting on his own language of Outsider art, the artist asserted, “When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccust.mes d and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not.mes an solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects of ordinary things" (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 23).