Jean Dubuffet Art Brut Portraits in Museum Gallery

5 October 2017 · Paris

Three Jean Dubuffet figurative heads hang in a row on a white museum gallery wall — each one rawer than the last. The leftmost portrait sits against near-black, its skull-like face picked out in scratched lines; the centre piece is worked in pale earthy textures; the largest, rightmost canvas pushes a swollen dark head against an ochre ground with flashes of red at the collar. Dubuffet's Art Brut method is plain in the surfaces: sand, tar, and pigment built up until the paint becomes something closer to excavated matter than applied colour. The wall labels confirm the Jean Dubuffet attribution. A warm timber floor anchors the space below.