Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Portrait bleu – 2005

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Blue Portrait – 2005 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: Blue Portrait Date: 2005 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 2005” in the bottom left, in blue pencil. Technique: Blue pencil, white chalk and charcoal on prepared gray paper. The face is modeled with white chalk and black, outlined by a free network of blue lines. The support, grainy, bears a worked gray background, nearly an emulsion. Dimensions: 59 × 42.5 cm Condition: Good overall. The blue line is sharp, the chalk well held, eyes strongly defined. Studio paper, visible grain, slight surface irregularities and a few traces of preparation, without any damage to the face. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Portrait from 2005, in Detheux’s latest manner. The face is not described: it is held by the line. Front-facing head, very open eyes, outlined in black, mouth barely indicated by a blue knot. White chalk builds the nose, cheek, and forehead; charcoal deepens the eye sockets. Around it, the blue pencil does not close anything: hair, contour, strands, all lines that pass over the face and go beyond it. The format, taller than wide, isolates the head. No constructed shoulder, no background. The gray of the paper, grainy and prepared, serves as background and skin. The blue is not a local color: it is the thread that holds the figure, and which could also undo it. We are already in the spectral portraits of the 2000s, but the gaze here does not close. It fixes. The sheet remains in Detheux’s graphic surrealism — face, hatching, line that overflows — with no anecdote. Signed, dated, in good format and with a rare color in the fonds: a characteristic piece of the late period, for collectors of Belgian drawing sensitive to appearing faces and lines left open. Artist biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure of Belgian art in the 20th century. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in the Fine Arts of 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 Prize for Young Belgian Painting in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: the body and female face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000s-2010s: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. This sheet belongs to the last period. Little exposed in life, Detheux worked freely. The unveiling of his studio collection (nearly 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain, and Europe.

Estimación:€200

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