By opposing an excessive standardisation of visual and linguistic cultural forms, Jean Dubuffet profoundly renewed the relationship between art and language. Early on, he rejected aesthetic hierarchies and the dominant usages of language, preferring a form of expression set free from academic frameworks. Writing is central to his work, it provides an instinctive raw material—scrawl-like markings that seem to be shouting out or expressing an inner monologue.

His works incorporate signs and symbols, words and pseudo-writings evocative of a child’s handwriting or an imaginary language. This research resonates with Antonin Artaud, for whom language—if it was to regain a vital, physical intensity—had to be wrested from its rational usage. Dubuffet also maintained a fruitful dialogue with Jean Paulhan, a key figure known for his reflections on the subject of language, clichés and the mechanisms of cultural legitimation.

By advocating “art brut”, Dubuffet was defending an emancipated form of language born of marginality and non-knowledge. In his work, writing, drawing and painting stem from the same gesture: a desire to reinvent an undisciplined, primitive language that is capable of rendering reality without submitting it to the order of discourse.

These reflections are particularly explicit in the works that comprise “L’Hourloupe”. In this cycle, Dubuffet develops an artistic vocabulary ofcompartmentalised, repeatable forms that could be combined together to constitute a visual grammar. Some works, such as “L’Algèbre de l’Hourloupe”, embrace this systemic dimension: its figures act as elementary units comparable to letters or symbols whose meaning lies in relations and combinations. Language becomes a play of open structures in which meaning emerges from usage rather than from a pre-established message.

-Loïc Le Gall