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Poiro Zanzibare
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Throughout his long career, Jean Dubuffet pioneered a provocative, rebellious attitude toward art and culture. Seeking direct contact with the forces of creation, Dubuffet found inspiration in what he called Art Brut ("raw art") – art of the insane, non-Western art, children's drawings, and graffiti. His use of unconventional materials, constituting a revolt against traditional definitions of beauty, influenced many twentieth-century artists. After completing his Texturologies and Materiologies of the late 1950s, Dubuffet felt that he had exhausted his investigation of natural materials and phenomena. "It is the unreal now that enchants me; I have an appetite for nontruth, the false life, the antiworld." He began his "Paris Circus" series in February 1961, marking an important transition in his art. A dizzyingly dynamic Paris – not the real Paris, but an invented one, transformed into a kaleidoscopic circus – was now his focus. "I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops, and buildings to join in a crazy dance," said the artist. In Poiro Zanzibare, Dubuffet combines bright, unmixed colors, boldly outlined figures, and handwritten slogans to produce a glowing overall composition. The nervously contoured characters are both comic and grotesque. These long-nosed Pinocchio-like creatures, who seem to mock the viewer, remind us that Dubuffet worked as a puppeteer in the mid-1930s, making masks and marionettes. They are enclosed in cells alongside graffiti-like inscriptions, many of which are either crude or nonsensical, as is the title.
Title: Poiro Zanzibare
Description:
Throughout his long career, Jean Dubuffet pioneered a provocative, rebellious attitude toward art and culture.
Seeking direct contact with the forces of creation, Dubuffet found inspiration in what he called Art Brut ("raw art") – art of the insane, non-Western art, children's drawings, and graffiti.
His use of unconventional materials, constituting a revolt against traditional definitions of beauty, influenced many twentieth-century artists.
After completing his Texturologies and Materiologies of the late 1950s, Dubuffet felt that he had exhausted his investigation of natural materials and phenomena.
"It is the unreal now that enchants me; I have an appetite for nontruth, the false life, the antiworld.
" He began his "Paris Circus" series in February 1961, marking an important transition in his art.
A dizzyingly dynamic Paris – not the real Paris, but an invented one, transformed into a kaleidoscopic circus – was now his focus.
"I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops, and buildings to join in a crazy dance," said the artist.
In Poiro Zanzibare, Dubuffet combines bright, unmixed colors, boldly outlined figures, and handwritten slogans to produce a glowing overall composition.
The nervously contoured characters are both comic and grotesque.
These long-nosed Pinocchio-like creatures, who seem to mock the viewer, remind us that Dubuffet worked as a puppeteer in the mid-1930s, making masks and marionettes.
They are enclosed in cells alongside graffiti-like inscriptions, many of which are either crude or nonsensical, as is the title.