Art - Ned Denny on Dubuffet's flagrant disregard for traditional ideals of beauty

Jean Dubuffet sticks two fingers up at the most hallowed values of western painting. Thus, in a typical Dubuffet canvas, you do not find an array of carefully mixed colours but a sludgy mess of paint that more closely resembles mud, excrement or coal. Nor does he resort to any of the perspectival trickery that artists have used for centuries to create the illusion of space, of milky-blue vistas stretching off into an untroubled infinity. His pictures are resolutely flat. He does, admittedly, include in much of his work figures and landscapes that can be recognised as such, but they are drawn with a flagrant disregard for every traditional ideal of beauty that renders them monstrous and other-worldly.

Of course, not all these departures are entirely unprecedented. Braque and Picasso at one stage limited their palette to a narrow range of blacks, whites, greys and browns, but then this was to pursue all the more single-mindedly their fly's-eye-view deconstruction of forms. Numerous avant-garde artists had limited their work to two dimensions, but this was the beginning of abstract art and its high-minded exploration of the emotional charge of patterns and colours. In Dubuffet's case the situation is different - his neglect of colour, perspective and all but the most primitive methods of representation stems not from a narrowing of his field of interest, but from a more general rejection of sophisticated artifice. "I had the feeling," he wrote, "that paintings lacking in cleverness, like those of children . . . could be just as effective as, if not more than, those produced in the name of culture." And elsewhere: "the task of painting is to adorn surfaces . . . to speak on this surface its own surface-language and not a false language of three-dimensional space." A picture by Dubuffet is not a window on an enchanted world or a transcendent realm of luminous forms but a surface on which he has scrawled, as though on the gloomy interior of a cell or a cave. With Dubuffet, pleasurable escapism ends.

So an early landscape, Paysage vineux of 1944, confronts you like a wall. The fields do not recede into the misty distance but are stacked one on top of the other like huge, irregular building blocks. The sky is constricted to a harassed-looking strip at the very top of the canvas where a tiny, blood-red house is attached to the horizon like a tick. The only inhabitants of this vertical country, a man and a white bull, seem far from the surface, and as deeply embedded in their respective field as a pair of fossils. It is the way a child would draw a picture, and it is utterly unromantic.

Into the early 1950s, Dubuffet's landscapes become progressively darker, his crusted and scorched-looking canvases evoking a savage earth formed entirely of the carbonised remains of extinct monsters. This strand of his work culminates at the end of the decade in a series of "landscapes" that test the limits of the term. Pictures such as L'Ame des sous-sols and Tumulte vegetal (both 1959) dispense with sky and distance altogether, presenting the view not of someone who looks along the land, but one who gazes downward into the mud and mulch (or, alternatively, a landscape not of the living but of the dead and buried). The light-giving window of western art has become a window crammed with earth.

Portraiture and the nude are treated with a similar lack of deference, a similar refusal to romanticise or prettify. Dubuffet's portraits don't idealise the face but caricature it mercilessly, showing it as if caught in the X-ray beam of an all-seeing eye. As with the landscapes, a primitive technique hints at truths that "high art" tends to obscure. A head such as Dhotel nuance d'abricot (1947), a strange hybrid of light bulb, insect and skull, looks as though it has been incised with a knife on an alley wall, fruit of some unspeakable midnight lucidity. Then there are the nudes, the most famous being the series of large canvases that resemble nothing so much as roadkill. This might sound flippant, but how better could he have emphasised the distorting flatness of the painted body? Spread out over the canvas as though by a steamroller, they are magnificent goddess-figures that appear to have passed through hell and come out leering.

All of this risks making Dubuffet out as an excessively morbid artist - which, as this abundantly comprehensive centennial exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris makes clear, is far from being the case. Even when he was painting the darkest of "soilscapes", he was constructing radiant landscapes entirely from petals and butterfly wings. The extremes of bareness and blossoming go hand in hand. And then there's that point in the early 1960s when, like an alchemist who is not granted the "gold" of vision until he has produced the blackest of blacks, his work undergoes a complete transformation. From that point on, and for most of the rest of his life, his paintings and sculptures resemble bright agglomerations of molecules or cells. Through his fearless perseverance in looking at the surfaces of things, one could imagine, he gained the power of looking into them.

"Jean Dubuffet" is at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (00 33 1 44 78 12 33) until 31 December

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