“[…] The specific point (I mean point of the mind) where the misunderstanding between the imaginary and the real is born, that point between the domination of evocations and that of objects, which poses the biggest threat of passing from one to the other, that point produces anxiety and discomfort in me, but also fascinates me to such an extent that I don’t know whether I fear it or search for it and seek it out.”

Chaise II (Chair II ) forms part of the L’Hourloupe cycle, an enigmatic title that Jean Dubuffet applied to the series of works he produced between 1962 and 1974. 

After his experiments with brut material that characterised his Art Informel work, in which Dubuffet explored organic and natural materials such as sand, gravel, bark and butterfly wings mixed with tempera, transparent varnishes and emulsions, he created a new world of signs and material in L’Hourloupe, at the age of sixty-one, when he had been painting for twenty years. The palette of natural colours is restricted to a few primary shades - red, blue, black and white - applied with a biro on paper using proliferating shapes and lines lacking in almost any reference to the known world. Starting in 1966, the flat surfaces of L’Hourloupe extend out of the paper to objects in the immediate environment. The sign is marked out with tempera and industrial paints on an artificial material such as polyester. A weightless volume, halfway between physical and artificial, the polyester lends itself by its very nature to the “culture of misunderstandings”,¹ placing the creative process within a void in which the boundaries between physical and mental disappear. 

L’Hourloupe was exhibited for the first time in 1964 during an exhibition in Venice, at the Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume in Palazzo Grassi, presented by Renato Barilli and Paolo Marinotti. 

The sculptures in this cycle include objects from everyday life, such as tables, ladders and chairs, where the conflict between reality and illusion becomes more apparent, inasmuch as in the mental field of L’Hourloupe the everyday object evades the “effet de réel” by its very nature.² 

When talking specifically about the Chaises a few years after the presentation of L’Hourloupe, Dubuffet provided crucial reflections for interpreting this work and the cycle as a whole: 

“Perhaps, in the chairs, I felt the discomfort that derives from confusing an object with its depiction more deeply: I mean when the configuration of an object becomes the object itself. The painter who depicts a chair on a flat surfaces does not worry for a moment that his depiction will be taken for a real chair or, in other words, that his evocation of a chair will go from the world of evocations to that of existing objects, which are then able to give rise to evocations. One would never consider the idea of sitting on a chair painted on canvas, but if the same chair were represented in three dimensions, it would therefore be given volume by the sculptor and one would be tempted to do so. When I say given volume, I mean given those characteristics that place it in relation to real objects, in front of which the mind is confused and reacts to it as if it were not a transcription of a movement of the mind in response to an object, but as an object that belongs to the real world. It no longer belongs to the world of the mind but to the physical, if not to say functional world - the world of chairs to be sat upon […] The specific point (I mean point of the mind) where the misunderstanding between the imaginary and the real is born, that point between the domination of evocations and that of objects, which poses the biggest threat of passing from one to the other, that point produces anxiety and discomfort in me, but also fascinates me to such an extent that I don’t know whether I fear it or search for it and seek it out.”³ 

Playing upon the continuous fluctuation established between the imaginary and the real, between dehumanisation and utopia, Dubuffet created a parallel world where “the elimination of natural and associative colours reinforces the character of these works as a landscape of the mind.”⁴ A double of reality with its characters, objects and places, or rather a utopian dimension “ideally driven towards an hourloupesque reconstruction of the universe.”⁵ 

Lara Conte

¹ Loreau 1966-91, vol. XXIII.

² Thévoz 1973, pp. 314-315.

³ J. Dubuffet, in Basel 1970.

⁴ M. Rowell Un’arte ai margini della cultura, in Modena 2005-06, p. 25.

⁵ L. Trucchi Un programma globale, in Roma 1989-90, p. 29.