Texte de terre 1959

Jean Dubuffet made this earthy abstract picture, "Texte de terre," probably using lithography to build up a dense, textured surface of browns and blacks. I can almost feel Dubuffet at work, layering and mottling the surface, allowing the image to emerge slowly. It reminds me of digging in the garden and seeing what turns up in the soil. It’s cool how he embraces the gritty and the raw, almost like an anti-art stance. You can see that his thick impasto is similar to the Art Informel movement, echoing artists like Fautrier, who were also playing with texture and materiality. It feels like he is in conversation with the earth itself, maybe even challenging the idea of what art should be. Artists are always riffing off each other, you know, like a never-ending jam session. This piece, with its tactile surface and ambiguous forms, invites us to look closer and reconsider the world around us.