"I want to free myself from the old nomenclature that I was led to believe catalogued reality. I want to transport my vision of what is around us in a different register, I want to live in an alternative reality."
P ainted just a few years preceding the artist’s death in 1985, Jean Dubuffet’s Mire G 109 (Kowloon) is an exquisite example of the artist’s quest to find an “alternate reality” in his paintings, a world brought to life throughout his career and crystallized in works that, like the present lot, are entirely freed from the confines of figurative representation. Belonging to the artist’s penultimate body of work, Dubuffet’s series of Mires (Test Patterns) highlight the artist’s relentless exploration of the limits of painting and use of the medium to analyze the human condition. A resplendent representation of the artist’s late life achievements, the painting was showcased in the French Pavillion at the 1984 Venice Biennale alongside other works from the Mires series, bringing the artist back to a city that he had long held dear and further positioning his status as one of the great artists of the twentieth century.
Exhibiting a dazzling flurry of primary colors, the painting converges into whirlwinds of scrawls and overlapping lines that encapsulate the distinct aesthetic impulses of Dubuffet’s career and his shaping of Art Brut, the movement he pioneered characterized by raw, energetic compositions that strayed from the limitations of academic art. The painting, dominated by the two colors that had preoccupied much of the artist’s late career, red and blue, highlights Dubuffet’s singular belief in these primary colors and the forms elicited from their contrast. In the interstitial spaces between its seemingly endless scrawls, the yellow ground of the painting emerges, an element that was in fact added after the rest of the painting, as evidenced by the white halos around these yellow swaths. In this manner, Dubuffet flips the script of the painting, the lines themselves generating the grounds on which they are seemingly inscribed. The subtitle of the work, Kowloon, metaphorically references the Chinese citadel and its infamously frenzied representation of urban life in the twentieth century, assuming in its scribbled surface, as curator Daniel Abadie writes, a “remote echo of a dream Asia, the name of Kowloon.” (Daniel Abadie, “The Dubuffet Revolution,” in New York, Pace Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: Mires, December 1984 - January 1985, n.p.). The painting’s surface, behind its endless scrawl and frenzy of its lines, is simultaneously flat and absent of scale yet, through its converging lines and resultant shapes, has a subtle tilting effect that further confounds its viewer. As Abadie remarks of the Mires’ supposed lack of center, “The beholder, at first disoriented by the lack of immediate frame of reference in these works, is reminded by the series title itself of the need to look closely in order to get oriented in the apparent disorder of lines slashing the surface” (Daniel Abadie, “The Dubuffet Revolution,” in New York, Pace Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: Mires, December 1984 - January 1985, n.p.).
Within its frenetic gestures and rich colors, Mire G 109 (Kowloon) encapsulates one of Dubuffet's fundamental inquiries in his desire to create art that, instead of serving as a reproduction of reality, is an exploration of its endless visual possibilities. Rather than being merely “abstract” or “figurative,” Dubuffet’s Mires aim to transform the supposed binary between the two, transforming our modes of thought and presenting a dazzling embodiment of his interrogation of the human condition through the painted surface, a decisive late-career monument to the decades of exploration that preceded it.
