COMP (cover of catalogues)
Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, couverture du Fascicule XIII, Célébration du sol I, 1957-1958, Weber éditeur, Paris/Genève, 1969
© Archives Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, couverture du Fascicule XIV, Célébration du sol II, 1958-1959, Weber éditeur, Paris/Genève, 1969
© Archives Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

COMP (work-garden)
Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten (Blumengarten), 1907, Private Collection

"In front of a printed image, I have the strong feeling that I have caught by surprise the image of secret things, of the ignored stages in the formation of things, as if their presence held more importance than their nature."

Jean Dubuffet

"The forms appreciated by living matter are the same everywhere, whether they be small objects or great geographical developments. In this spirit I like to interfere with scale in such a way that it is not clear if the picture represents a vast stretch of mountains, or a tiny piece of land."

Jean Dubuffet

At the beginning of 1955, Jean Dubuffet moved to the small, perched village of Vence in the heart of the Massif Provencal. A new phase thus begins in the artist's work, a phase of experimentation with matter and relief effects in landscapes which were the best way of representing his research and will become one of the primary subjects of his production.

In Dubuffet's work, the period of the 1950s represented the celebration of the material. Experimenting with the most unusual techniques, the artist threw himself into a project of tectonic excavation that only he, 'the man of ordinary things", could develop. Using pencils, paintbrushes even scissors, stamps and occasionally knives, the artist probed geological strata to reveal the world's hidden beauty, so that the familiar becomes strange and the everyday magical in the space of an instant. From the surprising perspective of the ground seen vertically from above, Dubuffet opens the door onto a fabulous dimension of the world, hitherto inaccessible. A world on the edge of the world.