Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - La folie des grandeurs – 1978 (Les jeux de l’été)

Payment required before the evening of October 26. No shipments possible from October 27 for nearly 3 weeks (absence). Robert Detheux (1932-2010) La folie des grandeurs – 1978 (Les jeux de l’été) Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: La folie des grandeurs Series: Les jeux de l’été Date: 1978 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 78” at the bottom right Technique: Mixed media on paper. Light washes, white highlights, lines and areas redrawn or scraped. Dimensions: 42 × 28 cm Condition: Very good overall. The material is held and coherent; the wash effects and surface are entirely intentional by the artist and fully contribute to the work. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artwork from the artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Work from 1978 belonging to the series Les jeux de l’été. The title La folie des grandeurs guides the reading toward forms that are monumental, almost architectural, but remain fragile and unfinished. The composition develops in light volumes, beige and white. One can discern large rounded masses, verticals, structures that evoke both bodies and constructions. The shapes stack, overlay, seek height and breadth that never fully stabilize. White highlights come over certain areas, reinforcing the effect of construction and simultaneous deconstruction. The material remains light, almost airy. Nothing is massive despite the title. The “folies of grandeur” here reads as an ambition of forms, a desire for monumentality that clashes with the delicacy of the wash and the surface of the paper. Detheux plays with this offset: the volumes want to impose themselves but remain translucent, open, incomplete. We are in a poetic and ironic vein of Belgian surrealism by Detheux in the late 1970s. The series Les jeux de l’été allows this type of lightness, where the title and the material respond to each other with distance. The eye moves between the masses, seeks an architecture or a figure, and remains in ambiguity. Rare work from the Les jeux de l’été series, titled, dated and with a beautiful economy of means. An elegant and suggestive piece for fans of Detheux who are sensitive to monumental forms and light washes. Biography of the artist: Born in Brussels in 1932 and died in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in 20th-century Belgian art. A graduate of the Institut Saint-Luc in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a cohesive personal body of work. From the 1950s, he developed a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The 1970s deepen the themes of the body and the female face, hybrid figures and textures. The following decades extend this territory toward grotesque, eroticism and black humor, before spectral portraits and appearances in the 2000s. Little was exhibited in his lifetime; Detheux worked freely. The unveiling of his studio archive (nearly 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, today captivates collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimation:€200

Voir tous les objets deCatawikiouArt Contemporain