The pairing that clarifies this work is an unlikely one: Jean Dubuffet alongside ancient Chinese oracle-bone script. Dubuffet's art brut theory argued that the untrained hand preserves a truth the schooled hand destroys; the Shang-dynasty bone-carvers, working three millennia earlier, collapsed pictogram and phoneme into single strokes. Hassan Oduya's upper cluster - two overlapping looped enclosures whose shared boundary is a crossing diagonal - sits precisely at this junction, neither legible word nor pure form.
The pairing that clarifies this work is an unlikely one: Jean Dubuffet alongside ancient Chinese oracle-bone script. Dubuffet's art brut theory argued that the untrained hand preserves a truth the schooled hand destroys; the Shang-dynasty bone-carvers, working three millennia earlier, collapsed pictogram and phoneme into single strokes. Hassan Oduya's upper cluster - two overlapping looped enclosures whose shared boundary is a crossing diagonal - sits precisely at this junction, neither legible word nor pure form.
- Curatorial note, wifärt gallery