Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Le chat voilé - 2005

Artist: Robert Detheux 1932-2010 Belgium

Title: The Cat in Metamorphosis
Artist: Robert Detheux
Date: 2007
Dimensions: 43.5 cm × 33 cm
Technique: Pencil and white chalk highlights on paper

Signature and date: Signed and dated 2007 at the bottom right

Frame: Sold unframed

Shipping: Artwork sent flat, with appropriate professional packaging.

Condition: Very good. Note: there is a former adhesive on the back, now removed, which has caused a slight thinning of the paper at that spot. This alteration is strictly localized to the back and does not penetrate the support.

Robert Detheux – The Cat in Metamorphosis (2007)
Dated 2007, The Cat in Metamorphosis is in keeping with the late-career research of Robert Detheux around the figure of the cat, a central and recurring motif of his graphic work. This piece testifies to a phase of great maturity, where drawing becomes more pared-down, more interior, while preserving a strong expressive charge.

Description of the work
The work presents a hybrid figure, oscillating between a cat and a feminine figure, as if caught in an unfinished state of transformation. The face, frontal and deliberately unstable, emerges from the paper in fragments. The pencil lines, free and sometimes tremulous, overlay the white chalk highlights, which modulate the light and intensify the sense of the passage from one state to another.
The gaze, asymmetric, acts as an emotional focal point, while the body, scarcely suggested, dissolves into the support. The boundary between animality and humanity remains deliberately blurred, revealing a silent, almost meditative presence.
The paper, warm and subtly nuanced, fully participates in the atmosphere of restraint and melancholy, reinforcing the impression of a fragile apparition, suspended between two forms.

Artistic context
At Robert Detheux's, the cat is never merely an animal figure. It becomes a vector of introspection, a mental image, sometimes close to an inner self-portrait. In Le Chat en métamorphose, this figure transforms and slips toward the feminine, never settling, conveying a reflection on identity, becoming, and the instability of form.
The work is fully aligned with the tradition of Belgian poetic surrealism, where suggestion takes precedence over description, and where drawing acts as a space of slow revelation, born from dream and the unconscious.

Resonances and Influences
The fragmentation of the figure, the slowness of the gaze imposed on the spectator, and the tension between appearance and erasure evoke the expressive sobriety of Balthus. One can also note an affinity with Leonor Fini in the symbolic approach to the cat, envisaged as an inner figure, at once fragile, sovereign, and enigmatic.

Artist Biography
Born in Brussels in 1932, Robert Detheux is a major figure in Belgian Surrealism. A draftsman above all, he develops a graphic language based on restraint, silence and chiaroscuro. His work explores the territories of dream, the unspoken and erasure. He dies in 2010, leaving behind a rare, intimate and deeply poetic body of work.

Provenance
The artist's family collection

A unique and original work, The Cat in Metamorphosis distinguishes itself by the delicacy of its line and the depth of its inner presence. Signed and dated 2007, it constitutes a particularly accomplished testimony to Robert Detheux's late-career research around metamorphosis, silence, and the boundary between animality and humanity.