Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Portrait spectral

lot/robert detheux 1932 2010 portrait spectral 2008 8ewAgrH 633433890 / Price history

lot/robert detheux 1932 2010 portrait spectral 2008 8ewAgrH 633433890

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lot/robert detheux 1932 2010 portrait spectral 2008 8ewAgrH 633433890

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Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Portrait spectral – 2008

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Spectral Portrait – 2008 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: Spectral portrait Date: 2008 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 2008” at the bottom left. Technique: White chalk and charcoal on brown-toned paper. The face is modeled with tight hatching of chalk, outlined with free charcoal lines. The background is not a wash added: the paper, tinted through and through, carries the drawing. Dimensions: 50 × 45 cm Condition: Good overall, as expected for a studio sheet. The line is crisp, the chalk adheres well, the facial modeling is legible. Soft, textured paper, with halos, slight tonal variations and a few conservation spots, without any damage to the drawing. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Late portrait of Robert Detheux, created in 2008, two years before his passing. The face is no longer described: it emerges. A head of a child or an androgynous figure, tilted, rising from the brown paper with only white chalk. The eyes, heavy and almost closed, the mouth barely indicated, the ear sketched on the right give the figure this floating presence of the final years. The modeling is built with parallel hatching, tight on the forehead, cheek and neck, looser in the hair. Around it, the charcoal remains open: strands, shoulder contour, a long stroke that joins the signature. Nothing is closed. The head seems half-out of the support, like an apparition that the paper still restrains. The warm brown of the background, the white of the chalk and the black of the scarce accents — pupils, signature, a few contours — are enough. No added color, no decoration. We are in the last manner of Detheux: the graphic surrealism of the 1950s has been reduced to a face, and this face no longer poses. It bursts forth. Signed, dated, of good format and from a period when the spectral portrait becomes the sole subject: a characteristic sheet from the late years, for lovers of Belgian drawing sensitive to buried figures and apparitions. Artist’s biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and deceased in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in Belgian art of the 20th century. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute of Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal, highly coherent body of work. From the 1950s, he established himself with a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Prize for Young Belgian Painting in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: body and female face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, dark humor. 2000-2010: spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures. This sheet belongs to that last period. Little exhibited during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his studio archive (nearly 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian Surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and across Europe.

Estimate:£169.27

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