Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Nature morte surréaliste – Le chandelier et le visage – 1957

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Surrealist Still Life – The Candelabrum and the Face – 1957

Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010)

Title of the work: Surrealist still life – The candlestick and the face

Date: 1957

Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 57” in the upper right.

Medium: Ink and wash (watercolor/gouache) on paper. Pen line, dense hatching, orange and brown wash.

Dimensions: 41 × 22.5 cm

Condition: Very good overall. The line is clear, the hatching dense, the orange wash well restrained. Period paper, with its grain, subtle tonal variations and some natural conservation stains, without affecting the drawing.

Sold unframed.

Provenance: Artist’s studio archive (acquired directly).

Description:
Rare surrealist sheet from 1957, fully in line with Robert Detheux’s early period, the period following the Belgian Young Painter Prize in 1953 and 1954. The artist is twenty-five years old. The language is already his: displaced object, obsessive hatching, a face that is not a portrait.

The sheet reads in two registers. At the top, an impossible still life. A turned candlestick bears a long, tapered candle.

Behind it, a horizontal bar pierced with holes and teeth — keyboard, organ socket, machine — cuts space like an instrument without music. On the right, a sphere heavily hatched, almost a closed eye, rests on the orange surface. Nothing is described for itself. The objects are assembled to produce a presence.

At the bottom, under the edge of the table, a face emerges from the brown wash. Eyes closed, brows marked, right ear, broad forehead. This is not a reflection. It is the other side of the still life: the sleeper, the dreamer, the figure that the table covers. The line, freer than in the objects, leaves the face half-visible.

The orange of the surface, the brown of the bottom, the black of the hatchings and the pale, almost naked background give the sheet its tension. We are in Belgian Surrealism of the 1950s — displaced objects, silence, figure beneath the thing — without pastiche.

Detheux does not cite Magritte: he is already constructing his own theater of objects and faces.

Dated, signed, with a rare format and a period little present on the market: a young-work piece characteristic for lovers of Belgian surrealism sensitive to dreamlike still lifes and buried figures.

Artist Biography
Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away 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 the Fine Arts at Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Tournai Academy until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work of strong coherence.

Since the 1950s, he established himself with a highly personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painter Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971.

This sheet belongs to that first period, rare on the market: displaced objects, faces, hatchings, warm washes.

The following decades deepened the same territory. 1970s: body and female face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000s-2010s: spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures.

Little exposed during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his studio collection (nearly 1,500 works) has made this coherence visible.

His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now draws the attention of collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.