Detail

Francois Dufrêne worked as a painter, object artist, poet, and singer. He was a founding member of Nouveau Réalisme and founder of ‘poèsie sonore’ (sound poetry). Dufrêne’s visual artworks consist of pictures of the backs of poster hoardings while his colleagues Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, and Mimmo Rotella concerned themselves with the front. As with other members of the New Realists, Dufrêne tried to integrate the reality of everyday life into his art. The first biennale of young artists was held in 1959 in Paris and it was the first time that the "Affichistes" (poster tearers) were represented on such a scale. Dufrêne provided the ceiling of the exhibition room. You can see one quarter of that work, which was shown in the Salle d’Informel, in front of you now. Dufrêne described his procedure thus: “I became ecstatic in front of a pretty big billboard on which a poster in black, grey, and white was showing through as a negative print. I tore smaller pictures out of the whole complex that looked devilishly Japanese.” These obverse of posters that the artist scratches and cuts his way through, uncovering things layer by layer, are then mounted on canvas. Dufrêne selects his "Dessous d’affiches" on the basis of aesthetics: his first concern is not what the poster says, but the nuances of colour and its tonalities, the way the resulting "picture" looks.