Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Visage sur petites annonces – 1980

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Portrait on classifieds – 1980 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: Face on classifieds Date: 1980 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 80” bottom left. Studio stamp “Robert Detheux – Atelier de l’artiste” on the back. Technique: Greasy crayon, white chalk and red highlights on a newspaper collage marouflaged onto cardboard. The support is a page from Belgian classifieds (cars, motorcycles, houses, painting, leisure). The face is laid over it, without obscuring the text. Dimensions: 50 × 40 cm Condition: Good overall condition. The collage is secured, the lines are clean, the chalk on the nose adheres well. Studio cardboard, aged newspaper, a few creases and handling marks, without affecting the face. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio fonds (acquired directly). Studio stamp on the back. Description: Work from 1980. Detheux was forty-eight. The face is no longer modeled: it is reduced to what is seen. Two large eyes, outlined in red, white pupils hachured (scored), a dot in the center. Nose drawn with a band of chalk. Mouth drawn in a single red line. The contour of the chin, in black, barely closes the head. Above, a few strands. The background is not a wash. This is a page of classifieds: Ford Escort, Rover 2200, Opel Rekord, motorcycles, “household staff,” “childless couple,” painting, leisure. The text remains legible under the eyes. The figure does not erase the newspaper. It uses it. The face hovers above the marketplace of things—cars, houses, jobs—without belonging to it. We are in Detheux’s 1980s: grotesque, dry humor, a figure reduced to its signs. No Dada pastiche. The collage is not a quotation. It is the material the studio had at hand, and the drawing kept it. Signed, dated, stamped, on period newspaper: a rare piece in the collection, for lovers of Belgian drawing sensitive to faces that appear on text and to the dark humor of the 1980s. Artist’s biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and died 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: female body and face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, erotism, dark humor. This work belongs to that moment. 2000s-2010: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. Little exhibited during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The unveiling of his studio fonds (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:$224.08

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