Jean Dupuy / The Anagrammatic Paintings

It was by chance, so he said, that Jean Dupuy realized in 1973 his first anagram. Univers ardu en mécanique (Hard Mechanical Universe) was constituted using the 22 letters of the words “American Venus Unique Red,” printed on a red color pencil.
It would be ten years before the extraordinary discovery of this “equation” was claimed by the artist as his own; and it would change the course of his work.

In 1979, Dupuy put an end to the “chapter” of his organization of  collective performance concerts and progressively, experimentally, worked his way back to the field of “painting”— the practice that had originally shaped him as an artist—now immeasurably differenced, through the anagrammatic process. This started in the period 1979-1981 with his  anagrammatic portrait series of artist friends like George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, and Nam June Paik, and other distinctive figures from John Cage to Raymond Roussel—and more significantly in a 1981 exhibition at Paris’ Galerie Jean-Claude Riedel. Deriving from an excerpt from The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the show,  “Le plaisir solitaire”(“Solitary Pleasure”), comprised two crypto-anagrammatic installations built from the same eponymous source. Dupuy amplified this logic the following year with his anagrammatic performance/event  “To be knocked to the canvas” at the Grommet Gallery, New York (1982).

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