Café au damier 1961

Jean Dubuffet made this watery, washy painting of a Parisian cafe, sometime in the mid-20th century. You can imagine him outside, quickly sketching the world around him with loose, scratchy lines, trying to capture the energy of the street. I feel for Dubuffet, really I do. I know what it’s like to wrangle with a painting, to coax it into being. There’s a lot of thin paint here, but it is also built up in layers—you can see how he keeps adding more and more lines to define shapes. Look at the way he renders the buildings, a jumble of rectangles and squares, and how the faces are cartoonish and mask-like. The whole scene has a naive, almost childlike quality, like a kid trying to make sense of the big city. Dubuffet's painting reminds me that artists are always in conversation with one another, building on each other’s ideas and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be. He reminds us that painting is not just about representation, but a way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing the world in all its messy, glorious complexity.