When François Dufrêne discovers décollage for his artistic work, he simply turns the shreds of paper over—and like an archivist begins to work through the reverse sides of billboards.
How does one begin with an artist for whom everything is apparently interconnected? All his life, François Dufrêne did not confine himself to a specific medium. Consequently, the exhibition at the SCHIRN presents complementary films, audio recordings, and unprocessed and processed décollages on a par with and alongside one another.
Indefinable sounds that are reminiscent of breathing and language exercises in acting classes. Innocent sounds, vulgar sounds. A faint breath, breathing, a gradual increase from soft to loud and vice versa. A wonderfully strange singsong. And finally: staccato-like syllables that remotely betray their origin, the French language--but which could just as well be a francophone version of Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator." François Dufrêne did not just avail himself of the newly discovered possibilities of onomatopoeic poems; he exhausted them to the limit--and thus founded new movements himself: in 1946, barely sixteen years old, Paris-born Dufrêne joined the Lettrists around Isidore Isou. The group of artists was convinced that spoken and visual art had reached their limits. The poem of the future--which incidentally could also assume other forms, such as, for example, film--was to totally liberate itself from semantic contexts and in formal terms exist entirely on its own.
The radically new idea of "Lettrisme" seems made for Dufrêne: he can completely live out his enthusiasm for the spoken word, his interest in "calembour," the play on words or the pun. Yet this movement also begins to become too confining for him. He soon joins Jean-Louis Brau and Gil J Wolman to found the Ultra-Lettrists, whose name is quasi a platform, yet perhaps not quite meant to be seriously radical--because Dufrêne and his artist friends were in fact less concerned with a dogmatic, in this respect even more radically independent approach to language: nonsense and meaning were meant to be on equal footing; the sound of syllables, words, and sounds was to be recorded or recited spontaneously and directly and thus become a work of art the instant it originated. His "cryrhymes," which is how Dufrêne referred to his performances, delighted the eager art audience and influenced numerous avant-garde musicians and sound poets. In 1952 he developed his "film without film," a kind of soundtrack, so to speak, with an accompanying script that was presented in a niche program at the film festival in Cannes despite the complete lack of moving images.
Just a short time later, François Dufrêne worked on the first décollages with similarly undogmatic enthusiasm: when he got to know Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, they had already taken a large number of torn-off billboards into their studios. Dufrêne commented on this context in his usual smug way: he does not really take to the shreds of posters torn off by passers-by; he only likes them when they have been carefully selected by his "accomplices" Hains and Villeglé. In fact, Dufrêne was more interested himself in the back sides of his torn-off billboards, which develop a morbid aesthetic due to weathering as well as the repeated application of glue: colored layers shine out from between the innumerable glistening nuances of brown and beige--and letters, the remains of what was once somehow a larger context, perhaps one reason why Dufrêne, who was in love with language, decided on this approach to the poster. He works through the various layers like an archivist, scratched and furrowed, only to then again inscribe half sentences on one half of the reverse side in curly handwriting, the title: "Je ne suis pas un calligraphe moi! ni callo, ni caco." Along with Hains, Villeglé, Yves Klein, Tinguely, the art critic Pierre Restany, and other artists Dufrêne later founded the artist's group Nouveau réalisme, here, too, on a quest for maximum freedom that opened up further possibilities instead of restricting him in his own oeuvre.
Those who want to understand François Dufrêne have to consider all of this in toto: the ludic drive with which he conceives his phonetic poems or inscribes the reverse sides of billboards, and the conscientiousness with which he performs these tasks; his passion for language; for words, letters, and sounds; reassembled, sometimes as a play on words with a specific reference to what is actually spoken, and sometimes committed to pure form; and his newly discovered fascination with torn-off posters, or rather: for the reverse sides of his torn-off shreds of billboards.