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Lot Essay
Executed in January 1950, Les Rencontres (Paysage avec trois personnages) is the culminating paintings from Dubuffet's seminal series of landscapes known as Paysages grotesques.
Peter Selz writes of this series: "Between May 1949 and January 1950, Dubuffet painted a series of grotesquely animated landscapes; here he traced his line into a fairly thin, light-coloured paste which he applied over a darker ground, so that the scratched line becomes dark within its white surroundings. The landscapes have an arbitrary freedom of execution which lends them a child-like freshness and charm. The general light colour conveys a feeling of spring. He jam-packs his surfaces with lines and scratches, abrasions and tracks to indicate roads, paths, houses, people, trees, animals and undentified topographical features." (Exh. cat., The Works of Jean Dubuffet, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1962, p. 42)
The Paysages grotesques have their inspiration in the hot sands of the Sahara. In early 1949, Dubuffet had returned from his third and final trip to Algeria. Encouraged by his recent experience of the desert, he now felt compelled to devote himself to landscape painting. But these were not to be specific desert scenes, like the paintings from Dubuffet's previous Roses d'Allah, clowns du dsert series. Instead they have no location, but are more like mirages of the mind. Dubuffet commented, "They are no longer - or almost no longer - descriptive of external sites, but rather of facts which inhabit the painter's mind. They are landscapes of the brain, they aim to show the immaterial world that dwells in the mind of man: disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle, in turmoil, tatters borrowed from memories of the outside world and facts purely cerebral and internal - visceral perhaps."
Les Rencontres shows the meeting of three characters within a countryside landscape. Dubuffet scratches the cartoon-grotesque outlines of his figures into the material of the landscape, so that that there is no distinction made between man and his environment. The three men are drawn like Egyptian hieroglyphs and dominate the picture space. Dubuffet was creating an archetypal art and his characters have the monumentality of ancient gods. Their activity - an excited greeting between friends - is mundane, but has been given emblematic status.
Peter Selz writes of this series: "Between May 1949 and January 1950, Dubuffet painted a series of grotesquely animated landscapes; here he traced his line into a fairly thin, light-coloured paste which he applied over a darker ground, so that the scratched line becomes dark within its white surroundings. The landscapes have an arbitrary freedom of execution which lends them a child-like freshness and charm. The general light colour conveys a feeling of spring. He jam-packs his surfaces with lines and scratches, abrasions and tracks to indicate roads, paths, houses, people, trees, animals and undentified topographical features." (Exh. cat., The Works of Jean Dubuffet, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1962, p. 42)
The Paysages grotesques have their inspiration in the hot sands of the Sahara. In early 1949, Dubuffet had returned from his third and final trip to Algeria. Encouraged by his recent experience of the desert, he now felt compelled to devote himself to landscape painting. But these were not to be specific desert scenes, like the paintings from Dubuffet's previous Roses d'Allah, clowns du dsert series. Instead they have no location, but are more like mirages of the mind. Dubuffet commented, "They are no longer - or almost no longer - descriptive of external sites, but rather of facts which inhabit the painter's mind. They are landscapes of the brain, they aim to show the immaterial world that dwells in the mind of man: disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle, in turmoil, tatters borrowed from memories of the outside world and facts purely cerebral and internal - visceral perhaps."
Les Rencontres shows the meeting of three characters within a countryside landscape. Dubuffet scratches the cartoon-grotesque outlines of his figures into the material of the landscape, so that that there is no distinction made between man and his environment. The three men are drawn like Egyptian hieroglyphs and dominate the picture space. Dubuffet was creating an archetypal art and his characters have the monumentality of ancient gods. Their activity - an excited greeting between friends - is mundane, but has been given emblematic status.