Site avec 4 personnages

Thrumming with motion, Site avec 4 personnages, 1982, is a spirited work from Jean Dubuffet’s late series ‘Psycho-sites’. Amidst a flurry of animated lines float the four titular figures, each rendered in the joyful, naïve style which characterised the artist’s practice. Against a gleaming white ground, Dubuffet’s painted his ‘sites’, or cellular geometries, in eyepopping red, cerulean, and navy. Utterly divorced from classical perspectival traditions, the sites collapse time, action, and space into a single, feverish panel. The ‘mosaic-like’ composition of the present work recalls his earlier Théâtres de mémoire cycle, and like these previous paintings, Site avec 4 personnages evokes a fragmented yet powerfully vibrant vision of the world (‘Site avec 8 personnages’, Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat., Galerie Boulakia, Paris 2007, p. 94). After four months of artistic inactivity owing to his ailing health, Dubuffet returned to painting with a renewed sense of vigour in 1980. Such frenetic, non-stop action is mirrored in the works themselves, in which the commotion of colour and brushwork renders both figure and context. But legibility was not the intention of the artist; rather Dubuffet sought to ‘reinvent painting’ with the hope of producing an immediate and honest sensation (‘Site avec 5 personnages’, Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat., Galerie Boulakia, Paris 2007, p. 92). Such vivacity suffuses Site avec 4 personnages, which brims with a forceful, exuberant vigour.