Robert Detheux ( 1932-2010 ) - Le Chat à l’épaule

Work record

* Artist: Robert Detheux (1932–2010), Belgian School
* Title: The cat on the shoulder
* Date : 2008
* Dimensions: 45.5 × 30 cm
* Technique: Pencil drawing with white highlights on paper
* Signature and date: Signed and dated 2008
Condition: Good

* State of preservation: Presence of stains, slight irregularities of the support and variations in material, inherent to the technique and fully integrated into the composition.

Framing: Sold unframed
Sending: Artwork sent flat, carefully protected.
* Provenance: From the artist's family collection

Description
Created in 2008, The Cat on the Shoulder belongs to the final years of Robert Detheux's production, a period characterized by formal refinement and a fragmentary approach to the human figure. The narrow vertical format enhances the sense of withdrawal and favors an intimate reading of the image.

The composition presents an isolated human figure, deliberately incomplete. The face, illuminated by subtle white highlights, appears as a sensitive surface, almost veiled, while the body is partially dissolving into the background. The contours remain fragile, sometimes barely suggested, letting the materiality of the paper emerge.

On the shoulder of the figure rests a cat, treated with the same economy of graphic means. More suggested than described, it acts as a silent presence, both familiar and symbolic, establishing a discreet link between the human and the animal without recourse to explicit narration.

The background, worked by rubbing and light overlays, envelops the whole piece in a hushed atmosphere. The muted tones and the restrained drawing reinforce the sense of inner calm and of suspension.

Context and interpretation

This work is part of the continuity of an interiorized Belgian surrealism, where the human figure becomes a site of mental projection rather than a descriptive subject. For Robert Detheux, the animal is never anecdotal: it functions as a silent extension of the figure, a complicit presence or an interiorized part of the self.

Graphic restraint, the measured use of white, and the fragmentation of the body testify to a late mastery oriented toward the essential. The figure is no longer asserted as a body, but as a trace, state or apparition.

Note on the artist

Born in Brussels in 1932, Robert Detheux developed a primarily graphic body of work, marked by a strong formal coherence and deep interiority. His work explores the limits of the figure, between presence and erasure, in a personal lineage of postwar Belgian surrealism. He died in 2010, leaving behind a rare, demanding body of work of great unity.