FRANÇOIS DUFRÊNE – RAYMOND HAINS

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN ART AND WORDS / UNE AMITIÉ ENTRE L’ART ET LES MOTS

François Dufrêne (1930–1982) and Raymond Hains (1926–2005) first met in Paris in 1955. Between 1946 and 1953, Dufrêne had been closely connected with the Lettrist movement since its conception. He developed ‘ultralettrism’ and ‘crirythme’, which were based on spontaneity and directly recording sounds without a concrete score.

Since 1944, Hains had been fascinated by photography and had carried out a number of optical experiments. These led him to invent the ‘hypnagoscope’, a system of grooved lenses that made it possible to distort images in order to break the bonds of language. In 1949, Hains and his friend Jacques de la Villeglé produced their first short film, alongside a number of abstract films. They tore down posters from Parisian walls, presenting them later in the same year as fragments of a reality that had been forcibly removed from its original location.

Over the years that followed, their efforts to reinvent language and free themselves of aesthetic conventions led Hains and Dufrêne to create art representing the emancipation of words and linguistic expression from pre-defined forms. Like Hains and Villeglé, Dufrêne worked with pieces of poster torn down from walls, which he then displayed back-to-front. In 1960, all three artists signed the declaration of the foundation of nouveau réalisme, a movement conceived by the French critic, Pierre Restany. Hains and Dufrêne participated in all events held by the group, up until the retrospective that took place in Milan in 1970 in recognition of the movement’s ten-year anniversary.

Although Hains’s development as an artist ran parallel to Dufrêne’s own, the two cannot be conflated. Both artists may be known as leading ‘affichistes’, but their works nevertheless also revolve around the central importance of language and its oral expression. It is easy to trace their reinvention of the historical avant-garde, and yet at the same time, their creations are based on a fundamentally archaic poetic tradition that was liberated from the confines of the book. Their experimental pieces made important contributions to the history of post-war thought. Open to a wide range of disciplines, their highest goal was broad-minded emancipation that contradicted all other forms of thinking. Their inherently playful works aim to deconstruct the authority of the discourse and thus lend it a new dimension. They are radical in their expression of this will to steer twentieth-century art and the artist in a new direction.

The exhibition held at the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation brings together a comprehensive range of works by both artists. It focuses on the early torn posters from the 1950s, while also shedding light on the theoretical development of each artist’s work. Dufrêne authored countless polemical and poetic texts, which he continued to publish throughout his life after 1946 as a means of enhancing his creative explorations following works he produced from 1973 until his death. Based on the concept of ‘crirhythme’, his poetic works were a major force behind the emancipation of sound poetry, which brings together breath and voice. Dufrêne’s many sound recordings are a clear sign of his thought, which was just as iconoclastic as it was unorthodox and which was directly connected to the social and cultural circumstances of the time. Hains, a true mythologist, relentlessly cleft form and language in a series of endless associations, in which images and discourse intertwined to create a parallel depiction of a narrative, a story in which Hains himself was both fascinated witness and determined narrator.