Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - La joueuse de cartes – 2008

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) The Card Player – 2008 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The Card Player Date: 2008 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 2008” bottom left. Titled in pencil, by the artist, “The Card Player” at the bottom of the sheet. Technique: White chalk, charcoal and brown wash on paper. The face and bust are modeled with hatching and rubbing of chalk, deepened with black. The background is a warm wash, overlaid, with free strokes. Large sheet folded in four: the folds, vertical and horizontal, cross the figure and are part of the sheet as it remained. Dimensions: 60 × 46.5 cm Condition: Good condition for a studio sheet of this size. The drawing is sharp, the chalk adherent, the title and signature legible. Folded in four, with clearly visible central crease lines crossing the face. Soft paper, grain, halos and some conservation stains, no major tears. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Large sheet from 2008, titled by Detheux himself. The player is not at a table. She is the game. Head tilted, emerging from the brown with white chalk, eyes barely opened, mouth closed. The bust below dissolves into shoulders and arms suggested. To the right, an oval circled, almost a card or an empty plate. To the left, a hatched form, sleeve or hand, remains open. The crease in a cross cuts the sheet into four. It passes over the forehead, the nose, the mouth. Detheux did not draw despite the fold: the figure settled on it. The card player is thus already shared, like a folded card, even before being played. The title, carried at the bottom in pencil, confirms the reading without explaining it. We are in the final mode: spectral portrait, warm wash, little color, rare title in the artist’s hand. The graphic surrealism of the 1950s — displaced object, figure under the thing — is here reduced to a face and a name. The card is not shown. It is the player who has become it. Signed, dated, titled, in good format: a sheet characteristic of the late years, for collectors of Belgian surrealism sensitive to buried figures and titles carried by the artist. Artist biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in Belgian art of the 20th century. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work of great coherence. From the 1950s, he established himself with a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: body and female head, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000-2010: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. The present sheet belongs to this last period. Unexhibited during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The unveiling of his studio archive (about 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimate:£168.98

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