Texte de terre 1959

Jean Dubuffet made ‘Texte de terre’ using lithography sometime around 1959. It’s like he took a piece of the earth and pressed it onto paper! I’m always fascinated by surfaces, and this one is all about texture. It's not just brown; it's a whole world of browns and blacks, layered like sediment. Look closely, and you’ll see it’s made of tiny specks, built up, each one a little decision, a little gesture. It reminds me of my own process, how a painting evolves from one mark to the next. There’s a patch on the left side where the brown seems to deepen into black. I wonder if that was one of the first marks he made? It feels so primal, like staring at the ground and seeing the whole universe in a handful of dirt. Dubuffet reminds me a bit of Guston in that he was reaching for something raw, something almost anti-art.