Rendered in a chaotic yet harmonious palette of primary colors and muted periwinkle, peach, and burgundy, Le Présent se change en passé presents a barrage of imagery that unravels as it recedes in and out between figuration and abstraction. In this arresting psychological landscape, the present work brilliantly conflates Dubuffet’s signature Art Brut figures with the modern technique of collage to proclaim the apotheosis of his masterful painterly practice. Dated 1976, Le Présent se change en passé is an exceptional work from one of the artist’s final and most significant bodies of work, Théâtres de mémoire, and it is distinguished as being part of a limited suite of large-scale paintings from this series that.mes asure more than fifty inches in either direction. Test.mes nt to their pivotal importance within Dubuffet’s iconic oeuvre, numerous works that the artist executed on this scale now reside in the permanent collects ions of institutions such as Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Immersing our gaze within a majestic kaleidoscope of electrifying colors and daring forms all assembled within a flattened picture plane, Dubuffet’s Le Présent se change en passé presents the quintessential synthesis of some of the Modernist master’s most successful visual strategies.
Establishing Rarity: Le Présent se change en passé in Context
Jean Dubuffet's Théâtres de mémoire series - named after Francis Yates' book "The Art of Memory" - comprise one of Dubuffet's final and most significant bodies of work. The present work is rarified as being part of a limited grouping of large-scale Théâtres de mémoire paintings (measuring greater than 50 inches in either direction) within the broader body of work. Of the works on this scale, there are 9 in museum collects ions - illustrated below - and another 17 in the collects ion of the Jean Dubuffet Foundation.
The execution of Théâtres de mémoire marked a watershed moment in Dubuffet’s prolific career in which he fused his distinct visual vocabulary with the technique of assemblage to create stunning works of miscellanea fraught with post-war anxiety and internal, psychological drama. This series takes its name from Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo’s “theatre of memory,” a sixteenth-century theory mapping the development of memory through an imagined physical space, which Dubuffet discovered from Frances Yates’s seminal 1966 book, The Art of Memory. Considered a groundbreaking contribution to the discourse of human knowledge, The Art of Memory served as a valuable source for Dubuffet, who visually translated Yates’s ideas into the remarkable group of large-scale works he executed between 1975 and 1980. Following several highly prolific years of production, the artist found his studio strewn with jumbled layers of drawings and paintings, creating random juxtapositions of figure and ground that inspired him to combine the various images into original works. By situating existing images into entirely new configurations, Dubuffet illustrated Yates’s core tenets of how place and image can solidify memory in a pictorial space. Of this ambitious series, Dubuffet remarks: “These assemblages have mixtures of sites and scenes, which are the constituent parts of a moment of viewing. Viewing by the mind, let us say, if not the immediate viewing by the eyes… The mind totalizes; it recapitulates all fields; it makes them dance together. It shuffles them, exchanges them, everything is astir… There is a great loss in what the eyes have caught when the mind gets hold of things. There is also a great addition; for the mind has quickly transfigured, substituting its own images for the ones it receives, mingling its own secretions with what the eyes send it” (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Pace Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: Théâtres de mémoire, March – April 1977, n. p.).
Right: Fernand Leger, The Construction Workers, 1950. Musee National Fernand Leger, Biot. Art © 2022 Fernand Leger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A cohesive tumult of color and line, Le Présent se change en passé presents Dubuffet’s answer to the phenomenological mysteries behind the experience of human memory. Repurposing several of his earlier drawings on paper, Dubuffet abundantly yet neatly collages cut-out elements onto canvas here to create a rich tapestry of color, movement, and form as whirling lines and nascent compositions intersect. Albeit flattened along a singular picture plane and grounded in Dubuffet’s signature art brut figures and heads, Le Présent se change en passé presents a mesmerizing visual experience that is orchestrated by his organic, cellular brushstrokes and punctuated by bursts of electric blue, swathes of buttery yellow, and stripes of brick red. Dubuffet’s willingness to activate passages with spontaneous jolts of primary color seen in the present work marks a significant shift from the muted earthen tones that had defined his earlier work from the 1950s.
Reveling in a patchwork of varied patterns and tones, Dubuffet avails himself of the full spectrum of color to tactfully tease out subtle relationships within an otherwise frenetic maelstrom of intense pictorial stimulation. In their abrupt cessations of motion and truncated areas of pigment, the clashing shades and patterns assembled in Le Présent se change en passé brilliantly reproduce Dubuffet’s conception of memory. Speaking of Dubuffet’s success to realize his ambitious philosophical aims, critic Kent Minturn remarks, “Memories swarm and surge forward all at once, overpopulating the composition. Memories compete with each other, imposing and superimposing themselves. Some figures are in focus while others are blurry… Memory, in other words, is shown as it actually happens in our daily experience” (Kent Minturn, “Memory in the Present Tense,” Exh. Cat., New York, Pace Gallery, Théâtres de mémoire: Jean Dubuffet, 2018, p. 34).
Coalesced in both a chaotic frenzy and a seamless harmony of visual stimulation, the cascade of disparate images, bold lines, and saturated primary colors together unravel in Dubuffet’s Le Présent se change en passé as a triumphant declaration of Dubuffet’s prolific brilliance. In its succinct yet profound manifestation of Dubuffet’s thesis on the volatility of memory, the present work confirms Dubuffet’s enduring legacy as one of the greatest painters of the Post-War period. For Dubuffet, each canvas presented an opportunity to expand his immersive painterly universe and develop his formal vocabulary. In the present work, Dubuffet does both, adding to his extensive canon of figurative motifs while incorporating organically inspired abstract elements. In its astounding and complete activation of the canvas, Le Présent se change en passé exemplifies the best of Dubuffet’s last and most conceptually complex series.