Jean Dubuffet Quotes
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The technique used heavy, spiky pastes made of nothing other than ordinary oil paint, used thick and mixed with sand and gravel. I some cases – but these were the exception – a few miscellaneous objects were stuck into the wet paint, such as bits of string or little pieces of glass or mirror.
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Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
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There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
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I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. .As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.
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What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself.
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Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
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Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs ..like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.. ..an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..
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There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
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With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable - with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.
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Our point of view on this question of the function of art is the same in all cases: there's no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptic people or the art of people with knee problems.
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Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.
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..the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation.
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I had given up around 1950 any ambition of making a career as an artist.. .I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
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Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.
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Man Writes on Sand.
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Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
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Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.
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Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
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When I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking only at camels.
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The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the State's ministries have this single face, and I cannot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners.
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I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.. ..this position of seeing them (the objects, fh) without looking at them too much, without focussing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life.
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From the point of view of technique, I liked there to be internal lines in objects, I mean that instead of circumscribing forms, they animate the insides of things-the inside of formless and non-delimited areas. They function as internal textures and not primarily as contours.
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There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts tot the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
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Dancing is the last word in life. In dancing one draws nearer to oneself.