Dubuffet invented various techniques to portray soil in a series of paintings called ‘Texturologies’. For this work, he adapted the ‘Tyrolean’ technique, used by stone masons to texture newly plastered walls. Dubuffet shook a brush over the painting, which was laid on the floor, to scatter tiny droplets of paint across the surface. His intention was to give an ‘impression of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, which I could use to represent soil, but which could also evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, and even galaxies and nebulae’.