Ilhan Mimaroglu, "Double Mask & Deployment"

Dubuffet continues:

"...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..."

Ilhan Mimaroglu, "The Window"

Dubuffet continues:

" 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... "

L'Hourloupe was the title of an art book that featured line drawings with red and blue ball point pens. To Dubuffet, the title conjured up associations with "'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."



Allées et venues, 1965

Ilhan Mimaroglu, "Traffic"

Dubuffet began l'Hourloupe in 1962, just before MoMA was to do a retrospective (back when MoMa actually meant something). He was already 61 years old, and the process of self-evaluation had begun:

" 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. "

Ilhan Mimaroglu, "Canine"

A press guide to a 2003 exhibition of Dubuffet cites Coucou Bazar as the culmination of the artist's evolution during the writing of his massive Hourloupe cycle:

Hourloupe represents the transfer of the world experienced by Dubuffet into ciphers that he created. The basic module is a linear pattern of a cellular structure. Content is translated into this module and allows a homogenous parcelling adapted by the content.

The structure is varied through hatching of differing intensity and offers the observers optical clues within the principle of the infinite. The colouring is limited to red, blue and black. With the transposition of the Dubuffet perception in the system of Hourloupe, the artist yet again raises a claims on the universal and applies the system not only two-dimensionally, but also three--dimensionally.

Sculpture, architecture, décor and costume allow for the expansion of painting into a new dimension. Complicated, theoretical approaches give way to a “concept of clarity”, which is a logical result from the permanent change leading to the further development of his works and depicts the Trace of an Adventure– the adventure of painting, the adventure of the life of Jean Dubuffet.

Autoportrait II, 1966

Ilhan Mimaroglu, "Reflections"

The joint was so big that Dubuffet needed to drive himself around in this.