Brut is not just a musky ’60s men’s fragrance. It’s a genre: ‘Art Brut’, a term invented by an unhinged Frenchman to describe ‘raw’, outsider art, the kind that exists way beyond the margins of the art establishment. That unhinged Frenchman? Jean Dubuffet, an artist whose faux-naive work is gobbled up by that establishment like it’s, well, a (du)buffet. You won’t get full at this show, though: there are just 14 works to see from the ‘Théâtres de mémoire’, a series Dubuffet created between 1975 and 1978, each offering a window into the ‘sites and scenes’ of the artist mind. And that mind is a terrifying but brilliant abyss.
Crude figures float in a scribbled mass on his canvases, with screaming dots for eyes. Disturbing images of children are drawn using two stacked circles plonked, with arms overlaping like tentacles. Noses are squiggled on in the shape of fidget spinners. Harsh lines hover around them, as though they are orbs suspended in space. Each could be pinned on the fridge of a proud but deluded parent.
But it’s all a performance: the man was obsessed with texture. Every piece is methodically collaged into sections, a palimpsest of rethought artworks. Lethargic colour smears sit in one corner, and energetic Jean-Michel Basquiat strokes in the next (Basquiat, by the way, owed an awful lot to Dubuffet). It’s like peering into a disorganised sewing box filled with swatches of art history.
Dubuffet wanted to find art in unlikely places, and mined the creations of children and the mentally unwell for his inspiration. He sought the work of troubled souls like an art ethnographer, and lived on borrowed pain.
At moments, the frenetic power of the paintings can take over. Dubuffet is a great game-changing painter, even if this is him well past his best. The real problem is that what was once radical and rejected feels exhausting in a contemporary scene saturated with ‘crude’ art. He’s been sullied by bad modern rip-offs, the poor old brute.