Jean Dubuffet Quotes
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible.
Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.
Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.
When I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking only at camels.
Mud, rubbish and dirt are man's companions all his life; shouldn't they be precious to him, and isn't one doing man's service to remind him of their beauty?
What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.
I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action.
There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.
I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.
I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.
There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium!
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves and unless one travels to completely new territories one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves and unless one travels to completely new territories one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself.