François Dufrêne

The work

Untitled (Dé-Klein series, no. 7901)
1979
Back of poster glued onto canvas
27 x 22 cm

François Dufrêne used fragments of posters from billboards or walls that had been torn down by people or weather, but unlike his colleagues Villeglé and Rotella, Dufrêne used the backs of the posters, the part glued to the wall.
In this small-format work, a blue color predominates inside a light curve located at the bottom. The title of the work, which plays on Yves Klein’s surname, is stamped on it. Klein himself and the critic Pierre Restany were the driving forces behind the Nouveau Réalisme group in 1960, and Klein created an important series of monochrome works using a blue he created himself, IKB (International Klein Blue), very similar to the blue in the work we are discussing.
On the other hand, note that the title, Dé-Klein, incorporates a prefix like that of dé-coller, which reverses the meaning of sticking, unsticking. Thus, Dé-Klein would mean the opposite of a Klein, that which is no longer a Klein but its reverse.

The artist

François Dufrêne’s work began in 1945 in connection with Lettrism, one of the first avant-garde movements to emerge in the post-World War II period, founded and developed in France by the Romanian-born poet, painter, filmmaker, and economist Isidore Isou (Romania, 1925 – Paris, 2007) with roots in Dadaism and Surrealism.
The name Lettrism comes from the early works consisting of pieces made with letters, puns, visual symbols, etc.
From the late 1950s, together with Villeglé, he began his work with the changes that time had wrought on the backs of posters peeled off walls and billboards. His premature death at the age of 52 brought an end to a body of work of profound artistic and poetic dimensions.