Idéoplasme VIII

Electrified waves of red and orange dance across the surface of Jean Dubuffet’s Idéoplasme VIII, part of a series of acrylic works created during the penultimate year of the artist’s life. Streaks of colour collide and burst against a swelling black which threatens to overtake the white ground. In Idéoplasme VIII, there is no beginning or end, but rather a cosmological time, the force of the Big Bang rendered with neon potency. Dubuffet returned at the end of his life to a frenetic, non-figurative style that had characterised much of his early output. Idéoplasme VIII is a stunning summation of the artist’s vibrant, vivacious career and an outstanding example of his Non-lieux works. In this series, Dubuffet’s visual vocabulary embraced spontaneity, where feverish brushwork forms an ‘all-over’ effect in which space and colour collapse into one another. For the artist, art was the expression of a primal, intuitive state, which he sought to capture on the canvas. Describing these sensations, Dubuffet wrote, ‘The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy; being is an attribute that the mind assigns to fantasy’ (J. Dubuffet in a letter to A. Glimcher, 19 April 1985 quoted in D. Kuspit, ‘Quixotic Quicksand? Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Groundless’ Paintings’, Artnet, January 2012). As if possessing all the energy in the universe, Idéoplasme VIII is propelled by its own momentum, a cacophony of movement which blazes across the stellar expanse.