Description

A play on playing cards

L’Hourloupe is the name invented by Jean Dubuffet for the cycle of works that he produced between 1962 and 1974, and with which he wanted to decipher reality in a new, unconventional manner. For the pack of cards Algèbre de l’Hourloupe. 52 figures extrapolatoires—which are not actual playing cards, but simply play with their form—Dubuffet has composed (or rather “extrapolated”, as the title says) 52 curious and ambiguous figures. His “math” is thereby based entirely on the spontaneous, immediate inventiveness of his artist’s hand and its elaboration of lines, forms and figures of its own accord. Figures that momentarily reveal a dog, a clown, a rocket or people embracing, only to conceal them again in order to send our fantasy in another direction. Algèbre de l’Hourloupe is a playful voyage of discovery into our own powers of imagination and into Dubuffet’s creative oeuvre.