" Questioning realities- that one had believed to be reality- is something invigorating. "
L'HOURLOUPE
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When Jean Dubuffet began the Hourloupe cycle in 1962, he was 61 years old and had been painting for 20 years. He lived between Paris, Vence and Le Touquet. After his important retrospective in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1960), he prepared another for the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1962). |
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| Time to look over past work: " In all my work there are two different winds that blow, one carrying me to exaggerate the marks of intervention, and the other, the opposite, which leads me to eliminate all human presence... and to drink from the source of this absence. " The Matériologies cycle reached completion... Time to return, with Paris Circus again, installed in 137 rue de Sèvres, after being in the United States for more than 10 years. | 
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It's this spirit that gave birth, in July 1962, to L'Hourloupe, Jean Dubuffet's longest cycle and most original work which ends in 1974. " The word Hourloupe was the title of a small book recently published and in which figured, with a text in jargon, reproductions of drawings using red and blue ballpoint pens. I associate it, by assonance, to " hurler " (to roar), to " hululer " (to hoot), to " loup " (wolf), to " Riquet à la Houppe " and the title of Maupassant's book " Le Horla " inspired by mental instability. " |
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" One expects
a painting to open new pathways to how we look at our everyday life (...)
Now it is necessary to become conscious of what we take as real and that
what strongly appears to us as such (as such alone) is nothing more than
an arbritary interpretation of things to which can be as well substituted
by another. The distinction that we make between real and imaginary is
badly founded. The interpretation of real, which seems to us vercious,
irrefutable, is only an invention of our spirit, or say rather, an antique
invention collectively adopted and of which our spirit is persuaded of.
Nothing other than convention. It is not forbidden to imagine the interpretation
of a world deciphered differently, regulated differently, than those which
we have held until now in full confidence. The cycle of works which has
been given the name L'Hourloupe answers an undertaking of that sort...
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A Product of Our Thoughts
| " ... My work preceding this cycle creates sinuous graphics responding with immediacy to spontaneous and, so to speak, uncontrolled impulses of my hand which traces them. These graphics start uncertain, fleeting, ambiguous figures. Their movement unclenches in the spirit that finds itself in their presence a " suractivation " of the faculty of seeing in their tangles all sorts of objects which make and unmake themselves as the eye moves, thus aligning intimately the transitory and the permanent, the real and the deceptive. It results in (...) a grasp of conscience of the illusionary character of the world we believe to be real, to which we call the real world. These graphics with constantly ambiguous references have the virtue (...) to put into question the foundation of that which we have traditionally looked at as reality and that is only in truth an option collectively adopted to interprate the world which surrounds us amongst an infinate number of other options, others that would be neither more or less legitimate "... | 
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Enter Into the Images
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" ... The
Hourloupe cycle began by drawings and paintings. After that I felt
a need to associate reliefs with these paintings to give them more
life and the result of it is painted and sculpted panels of which
the Cabinet logologique is an example. Then I began to want,
still in my thoughts, to augment the presence and action of these
paintings, to abandon the plane of the panel and to run back to
supports freely opened into space, sculpted on all faces, which
is different. I was then taken by the desire to not only face these
paintings while maintaining my feet on the shore of everyday life,
but to abandon this shore, to enter into the images, to inhabit
them. The result of it is a kind of allusive and figurative architecture,
imaginary architecture is everything which is not real architecture,
but rather images formed in a habitat. One sees oneself inside them,
totally surrounded by one's mental productions, and one can make
it one's only nourishment. " .... |
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