Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Portrait surréaliste d’un chat - 2005

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Portrait of a Cat – 2005 Artist : Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work : Portrait of a cat Date : 2005 Signature : Signed and dated « Detheux 2005 » at the bottom left. Medium : Graphite, charcoal and white highlights on paper, fixed to a slightly darker newspaper sheet, which overhangs at the edge. The cat is built with tight hatchings, the background with a gray wash and splatters. The eyes and a paw are emphasized with white. Dimensions : 58.5 × 44 cm Condition : Good overall. The line is clear, the eyes readable, the signature intact. Studio paper, grain, splashes and stains integrated into the drawing, a few traces of mounting on the tinted newspaper, without affecting the figure. Sold unframed, as mounted. Provenance : Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description : Portrait of 2005. Detheux was seventy-three years old. The cat is not a pet: it is a figure. Head too large, ears pricked, eyes very open, whitened, pupils fixed. Snout barely indicated, body compact, hatchings like a fur that reveals nothing. The front paws are the second subject. Long, bony, toes splayed, one whitened. They are no longer quite cat’s paws. They hold, they wait. The body below dissolves into hatchings. The background is not empty. Gray wash, darker on the left, black splashes, paper left light on the right. The tinted newspaper sheet behind broadens the gray and creates a darker margin. The cat seems to emerge from this greyness, held by it. We are in the late years: appearance, creature, gaze. Detheux’s graphic surrealism — hatchings, face, figure that is not a portrait — here passes through the animal. The cat looks. It does not pose. Signed, dated, well within format, mounted by the studio on tinted newspaper: a characteristic sheet of 2005, for lovers of Belgian drawing sensitive to creatures and fixed gazes. 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 Institute Saint-Luc 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 highly 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 face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000s-2010s: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. This sheet belongs to the latter period. Little exposed during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The uncovering of his workshop collection (nearly 1,500 works) has made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

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