In a letter to the present owner, Jean Dubuffet wrote about the "Sites tricolores" as follows:
"...Like all my works from before this Hourloupe cycle (and those connected with the performance Coucou bazar), these paintings show networks of erratic traces that have the power to conjure up conjectural figures. Here, they are figures of territories and sites. They have this power for me, at any rate. I have no idea about other viewers. It depends, evidently, on your mood. Of course, the uncertainty of these works (their uncertain virtue) has not escaped me. But I very much like artistic productions to be uncertain. I don't mind it even if they are extremely so.
Lovers of painting will no doubt be frustrated to find here nothing in the way of rough textures, unexpected reprises of touch and improvisation, which were so highly prized in the recent past.
There is no hand of the maker here. Nothing but impersonal traces and cursory, flat coloring. A whiff of the timeless and the incorporeal, as is appropriate for sites taken from the world of dreams, where there is no flesh..."
Additional works from this distinguished Collection will be offered in the London sales of Post-War and Contemporary Art in February 2006.