People Are Much More Beautiful Than They Think: Long Live Their True Face. - Jean Dubuffet

The Occidental man is not so bad.. .Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha].. .I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.. ..one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals.. .These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds..

I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist.. .I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

Starting from a drawing, a pure creation of the mind, I expand it in space by giving it three dimensions, by giving it a material body [in polystyrene] and then enlarge it to the proportions of a site where it can evolve. In this way, instead of having only the drawing before you while remaining anchored in the everyday world, you can finally leave the world and penetrate into drawing, and thus inhabit the creation of the mind instead of merely looking at it prudently in a frame on the wall. The experience consists, therefore, in abstracting yourself totally from the natural everyday world in order to feed your eyes solely on your own mental elaborations.