Thursday 9 October 2014

Flat plane sculptures - Jean Dubuffet

"Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (31 July 1901 – 12 May 1985) was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet

"Dubuffet was launched to success with a series of exhibitions that opposed the prevailing mood of post-war Paris and consequently sparked enormous scandal. While the public looked for a redemptive art and a restoration of old values, Dubuffet confronted them with childlike images that satirized the conventional genres of high art. And while the public looked for beauty, he gave them pictures with coarse textures and drab colors, which critics likened to dirt and excrement.
The emphasis on texture and materiality in Dubuffet's paintings might be read as an insistence on the real. In the aftermath of the war, it represented an appeal to acknowledge humanity's failings and begin again from the ground - literally the soil - up.
Dubuffet's Hourloupe style developed from a chance doodle while he was on the telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes filled with unmixed color. He believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture" http://www.theartstory.org/artist-dubuffet-jean.htm
 
I kind of like these sculptures, I like how textured they look, and the way the different shapes make up the different parts. I'm pretty sure he used automatic drawing to get the designs for these. I think it's very clever the way he gets the sculptures to look really 3D using colour and black lines despite the flat planes they are made from. Also, despite the outlines, everything seems to flow into each other, for example the pieces don't look separate, like they are just stuck together.

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