Painted in September 1951, Rocs et vestiges (Rocks and Remains) is an absorbing work from Jean Dubuffet’s series of Paysages du mental (‘Mental Landscapes’). This warm, earthy vision of texture and tone made its debut in Dubuffet’s landmark exhibition ‘Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy’ at Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in February 1952.
The famed MoMA curator William Rubin considered that ‘among the paintings of 1951-52 are some of the best of Dubuffet’s career’ (W. Rubin, ‘Jean Dubuffet’, Art International, Vol. IV, No. 4, May 1962, p. 52). Rocs et vestiges displays the material richness typical of this period. Using washes of russet brown over thick layers of scored, scraped and faceted oil paint, Dubuffet conjures a tawny landscape-like expanse beneath a gypsum sky. The painting is like a slice of the natural world, reminiscent of gnarled bark, cracked earth and burnished rock.
Dubuffet had experimented with heavy impasto paint since his portrait works of the 1940s, incising faces and figures into what he called hautes pâtes or ‘thick pastes’ which sometimes incorporated tar, gravel or sand. He developed this near-sculptural approach in his Corps de dames of April 1950 to February 1951, uniting figure and ground in the raw, slab-like forms of monumental earth-mothers that envisioned anatomy as terrain.
Rocs et vestiges takes its place in a gradual shift away from these landscaped nudes toward more overtly geological expanses, with Dubuffet using ever-thicker pastes to build up his pictures. If less violently charged than his depictions of the human figure, his landscapes were just as radical in their revision of a well-worn art-historical theme, doing away with pictorial convention in favour of the raw expression of what Dubuffet called ‘Art Brut’. Rocs et vestiges is no real landscape, but a landscape of the mind: Dubuffet’s thick, heavily inscribed surface at once mimics the actual textures of the earth and transforms the painting into an open, endlessly suggestive field for imagination, and for new beginnings.
‘My mortar,’ wrote Dubuffet, ‘applied with large dull putty knives, enabled me to provoke systems of reliefs in objects where reliefs are least expected, and at the same time lent itself to the very realistic effects of rugged and stony terrains. I enjoyed the idea that a single medium should have this double (ambiguous) power: to accentuate the actual and familiar character of certain elements (notably in figurations of ground and soils), and yet to precipitate other elements into a world of phantasmagoric unreality, endowing them with an unknown life, borrowed from other worlds than ours’ (J. Dubuffet, ‘Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy’, 1952, quoted in P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1962, p. 72).
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