Jean Dubuffet, Pendule IV (Flamboiement de l’heure) 1966

05 February 2025

In July 1962, Jean Dubuffet doodled absentmindedly as he took a phone call. After hanging up, he looked at the image before him and saw the foundation for his next body of work, which, in years to come, would become his most recognisable: the Hourloupe series. This work is a paradigmatic example: a tightly-ravelled orb of interlinked, irregular-shaped cells crowd the canvas, each bearing blue and red stripes of varying thicknesses and densities. The shape that they create is sprawling and almost biological in its composition, reaching outwards from the solid blue nucleus at the centre towards the borders of the image.

After years spent painting the brutality of post-war life in rural France, works like this one represented a new direction and a motif that would become one Dubuffet’s best known. Lacking recognisable figures or landscapes, the Hourloupe paintings were his attempt to paint a more distilled version of his reality, composed of pure form, colour and texture. In the artist’s words, “over and done with the mystical jubilations of the physical world: I have become nauseated by it and no longer wish toward except against it. It is the unreal now that enchants me.”[1]

Dubuffet’s earlier work had always carried a suggestion of abstraction — gesture and materiality were more important to him than straightforward representation — but the Hourloupe series was his first foray into what might be termed pure abstraction. It was a continuation of the Art brut style that he had pioneered by looking outside of the traditional art historical canon to inspire an immediate and visceral visual language. The word “Hourloupe” — a portmanteau of the French hurler, to shout and loup, wolf — encapsulates this spirit.