See Inside Closerie Falbala, Artist Jean Dubuffet’s Love Letter To ‘Anti Taste’

Art exists everywhere, not just in museums. Grace Banks has delved into the best places in the world to experience art off the beaten track in the book Art Escapes (Gestalten), highlighting some of the best works by artists including Niki de Saint Phalle, Sol LeWitt and Mark Rothko, in forests, streets and even churches. As we begin to plan our summer vacations, we’re highlighting some of the locations in Art Escapes that deserve a place on your summer itinerary.

Covered in his “L’Hourloupe” painterly strokes, this immersive sculpture was artist Jean Dubuffet’s lifetime ambition realised. A bold testament to anti-bourgeois mentality, its location tucked away in the middle of Périgny’s lush forests makes it the ultimate day trip in the east of France.

French painter Jean Dubuffet’s magnum opus was made to be trampled all over. There aren’t many times you can come fact to face with a Dubuffet like you can here, but in the middle of Périgny, France, is Closerie Falbala — Dubuffet’s shrine to the passion and provocation that art offers.

In 1976, reaching the end of his life, Dubuffet decided to embark on an immersive sculpture that would live beyond his own years. He wanted to combine the painterly “L’Hourloupe” scrawls he’d become so famous for in the sculptures The Auditor (1967) and Monument with Standing Beast (1984) with his love for graffiti scrawls painted in public spaces. The result is a gargantuan resin modular sculpture hand painted with Dubuffet’s iconic characters, surrounded by a terrace covered in abstract paintings. The aim was to create a meditative space that would last forever and that anyone could visit, from an aristocrat to a drug dealer, and it was Dubuffet favourite ever work.

This isn’t a destination for the faint hearted. Fittingly for an artist who called himself “anti taste”, Dubuffet painted the walls of Closerie Falbala over two years in the bold childlike strokes that had made him the outsider of modern art. Closerie Falbala was made to energise, and stepping inside feels like being within an ornament, a tender space, Logological Cabinet, was meant to be an intense experience, painted in his L’Hourloupe style from floor to ceiling in swirling tessellations. Good taste was a misguided concept in Dubuffet’s world, and for this reason, the walls curve and swoop, requiring imagination from the visitors who navigate around it.

Dubuffet finished the work as a 70 year old and saw it as the ultimate expression of a lifetime spent rejecting the stuffy notions of high culture. He thought the bourgeois were philistines and his career was built around a stubborn refusal to conform. “Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness” he once said. His Closerie Falbala masterpiece is the ultimate reckoning of this passion.