Achieving Surrealism: Dubuffet’s Carnation sanguine (1950)

Freddy Avis

20 August 2015

Achieving Surrealism: Dubuffet’s Carnation sanguine (1950)

            In the corner of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet’s surrealist exhibit sits Jean Dubuffet’s Carnation sanguine, a portrait of an amorphous alien-looking figure decorated with a child-like facial expression. It is immediately unsettling, and is easy to dismiss as either a nightmarish character or some sort of sick joke. Nevertheless, it trades on surrealism, and it is important to understand why and how it executes the style.

            Dubuffet championed the “art brut” style, which fought the hyper-intellectualism of mainstream art by bringing art back to material and visceral baseness and primitivism. Ironically, today Carnation sanguine appears in the sophisticated, white-walled Moderna Museet, but Dubuffet acknowledged that his target audience were those of the street. In its texture and construction, we can observe Carnation sanguine’s primitive aspects. The paint (or other pigment) sits on rugged stone or concrete with visible lumps and streaks, similar to those on a poorly maintained street. The ruggedness of the concrete material inevitably adds coarse and weathered traction to the painting, as if created and stored on the street. On top of material and texture is the actual outlining and drawing of the figure, which adheres to no apparent symmetry or geometry – only freehand, like a child. Also childlike are the drawings of facial expressions on the figure, which depict a face that may be innocent in its drawing but horrifying in its presentation. This dichotomy seems like the first source of the work’s surrealism.

            I would argue, however, that a second, more genre-driven surrealism surfaces at a grander level. On its face, Carnation sanguine accurately demonstrates “art brut” ideals by grounding itself in basic, tangible materials. In its substance, however, lies a deeply disturbing psychological aesthetic with undertones of the extraterrestrial, vastly transcending the relatable affect of “art brut.” The familiar body form in the painting inevitably qualifies the figure as vaguely human, but the amorphous structure and scattered drawings of organs (most notably the ears and the one arm), strike a deeply psychological chord, one of imagination, illusion, and memory. Moreover, science fiction becomes a factor if we process – either consciously or subconsciously - the figure as some sort of alien, again escaping the earthy and earthly bounds of the accessible “art brut.” In other words, Dubuffet pairs the most basic material and structural accessibility with the most bizarre, psychosomatic, and unearthly message. One important takeaway is that this type of surrealism (or maybe just Dubuffet’s particular flavor of surrealism exhibited in this work) relies on the existence of other established styles, the guidelines and templates of which can be relocated, appropriated, or perverted. At least it seems to one enthused patron.

Dubuffet seems to have achieved both visceral and intellectual surrealism in Carnation sanguine.