The Karsten Greve Gallery in Paris is exposing a most unexpected and innovative collection of works associating photos by Brassaï and both canvas and paper works by Jean Dubuffet. Works on which or in which he incorporates “material elements of daily life”. While Brassaï, armed with his camera, wandered Paris’ streets hunting for marks engraved by residents on the city’s plaster walls, Dubuffet was digging, scraping, scratching the lithographic stone. “Walls to him were like a book, a big book, on which he could read and write.”

The exhibition highlights works by these two artists whose identification with two diametrically opposed artistic movements without being enemies. One belonged to the surrealist movement while Dubuffet was the founder of Art Brut. For Brassaï, graffiti was a reflection of the collective subconscious. It was a reflection of the existential necessity to leave tracks, translated into a sort of primitive contortion, an anxious combination interrogating life, death, and love. A procession of deformed and cracked people, animals, hangmen and even suns and crowned kings. For Jean Dubuffet, the exhibition is a vast gathering of the lithographic series inspired by Eugène Guillevic’s “wall” poetry of 1945. Through the “wall” already present in his previous works, he establishes a dialogue between his works and literature.

Bernard Perrine
Correspondant de l’Institut de France
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

BRASSAÏ & DUBUFFET

Until May 21
Galerie Karsten Greve
5 rue Debelleyme
75003 Paris