Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - L’aveuglement

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Aveuglement – 1976 – Drawing / mixed technique surrealist erotic from the series of the 1970s

Details :

Artist : Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010)
Title : Aveuglement
Year : 1976

Technique : Mixed technique on paper (crayon, white highlights, texture effects, motifs embroidered in pearls with trompe-l’œil, pigment stains, black lines and textural overlay)

Support : Made paper with texture

Dimensions : 35.5 × 26.5 cm (sheet)

Signed : Yes – “Detheux 76” top right
Dated : Yes

Condition : Excellent. The irregularities, material overlays, stains and texture effects are entirely intentional and form an integral part of the work.

Framing : No (sold unframed)

Provenance : Work directly from the artist’s studios/estate (Sr Fine Art collection)

Description of the work

“Aveuglement” (1976) is an intimate and poetic work from the important erotic period of Robert Detheux in the 1970s.

In an intimate vertical format the artist presents an image of a female figure, fragmentary and kneeling, with a voluptuous and stylized body. The face is either veiled or gaze-less, which reinforces the central theme of blindness — both literally and symbolically.

Organic forms (breasts, belly, limbs) sensually emerge against a rich setting of dentelles and fabrics, painted in trompe-l’œil. White/brown accents and black lines emphasize the curves and create dramatic tension.

The textural overlaps, the transparencies, the floral and geometric motifs, as well as the material effects, build a lush, intimate and unsettling universe. Everything here revolves around perception, blind desires, a veil and revelation. The work floats between sensuous erotism and introspective mystery, between the beauty of the forms and the vulnerability of the human condition.

This work perfectly illustrates Detheux’s obsession with the boundary between body, desire, matter and veil. “Aveuglement” is a work that is simultaneously sensuous, unsettling and deeply modern in its treatment of the human figure.

Biographical note on the artist

Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) is a peculiar and demanding figure in Belgian art after World War II. A graduate of the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels in visual arts, he early on developed a personal visual language, influenced by surrealist and Dadaist movements, without dogmatic allegiance. From the 1950s he won fame as a poetic and subversive artist on the Belgian scene and won the prestigious Jeune Peinture Belge Prize three times (1953, 1954 and 1971).

Alongside his painting and drawing career, he taught graphic expression in the advertising department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Tournai until 1996. His oeuvre, with exceptional coherence, intensively explores the human figure, the metamorphosis of the body and the tension between flesh and matter.

In the 1970s he created an iconic series of drawings and paintings with sensual motifs in which fabric (laces, cloths, textures) becomes the real subject. A poet of fabric and body, Robert Detheux produced an introspective, sensual body of work often infused with black humor in which pain, desire and transformation meet in a visual language that is both demanding and deeply moving.

His works from the 1970s are today particularly coveted by collectors of Belgian surrealist art and expressionist figurative painting.