Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Estivant – 1979 - (Les jeux de l’été)

FR : Payment required before the evening of October 26 No shipments possible from October 27 for nearly 3 weeks (absence). EN : Payment required before the evening of October 26 No shipments possible from October 27 for nearly 3 weeks (absence). Robert Detheux (1932-2010) Estivant – 1979 (Les jeux de l’été) Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: Estivant Series: The Summer Games Date: 1979 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 79” bottom right Medium: Mixed media on paper. Light washes, reserves, light lines and scratched or revised areas. Dimensions: 43.8 × 34 cm Condition: Very good overall. The material holds together and coheres; the wash effects and surface are entirely intentional by the artist and fully contribute to the work. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description : Work from 1979 belonging to the series The Summer Games. The title Estivant immediately steers the reading toward a summer figure, light, almost evanescent. In the center of the sheet, a vertical, irregular form unfolds in beige and very light browns wash. One can discern a body or a garment, folds, a presence that remains deliberately blurred. The contours are uneven, sometimes interrupted, as if the figure were dissolving in the light or in the paper. Some more precise strokes and scratched areas help structure the mass without ever freezing it. The background is almost white, barely worked. This economy of means reinforces the effect of warmth and lightness. The estivant is not a described character, but a seasonal apparition, fragile, revealed and then disappears by the material. Detheux plays here on restraint: little color, little drawing, a lot of surface and quiet. One is in a lighter vein of Belgian surrealism by Detheux at the end of the 1970s. The figure is no longer hybrid or spectral as in other sheets; it is seasonal, ephemeral, tied to play and summer. The gaze moves through the washes, seeks the body, loses it, finds it again. Rare work from the series The Summer Games, titled, dated, and of great delicacy of material. A poetic and evocative piece for Detheux enthusiasts sensitive to light figures and washes. Artist biography : Born in Brussels in 1932 and deceased in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in 20th-century Belgian art. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels' Beaux-Arts, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work with strong coherence. From the 1950s, he developed a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painter Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The 1970s deepened themes of the body and the female face, hybrid figures and textures. The following decades extended this territory toward grotesque, eroticism and black humor, before spectral portraits and appearances in the 2000s. Little exposed during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. Unearthing 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 Europe.

Estimate:$224.04

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