“In my music, I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about Western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him from expressing himself freely and for his own good pleasure. This is exactly what I tried to do in my painting...”
Jean Dubuffet
Throughout his entire career, the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) challenged the canon of Western art by refusing its traditional subjects, rigid hierarchies and conventional ideals of beauty.
Dubuffet’s paintings reject all forms of academicism, originating from the free and volcanic creativity of their author. Since the beginning of the 1960s, the same expressive immediacy can also be found in the artist’s musical experimentations. In a series of recordings on magnetic tape, Dubuffet overturns the traditional rules of harmony and melody through a spontaneous succession of the most diverse sounds, which blend and overlap. Dubuffet’s painting is “brut” and so is his music: it is not an object of aesthetic contemplation, but rather a sensory suggestion.
