portfolio: ARTnews - Fred Deux at Alain Margaron

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Fred Deux
Alain Margaron
Paris

This exhibition featured a superb selection of more than 40 drawings and paintings on paper, spanning Fred Deux's remarkable 60-year career. Included was Je nais (I Am Born, 1949), which the artist considers to be his first painting, a sensual abstraction in ink and bicycle lacquer, the only materials he had available at the time.

Deux began his career as part of the French Surrealist movement, experimenting with automatism, spots and drips, and other forms of mark-making. He officially split from his Surrealist colleagues in the mid-'50s, though his work retained clear kinship with that of Victor Brauner and Hans Bellmer as Deux continued to refine his esthetic. That vision emerged in 1960 with the erotically charged Éclatements (Burstings), a labyrinthine drawing of intertwined limbs.

Seen as a whole, Deux's body of work is unsettling. It examines complex psychological spaces using both abstract and figural imagery that is often (though not exclusively) macabre. One of Deux's hallmarks is honeycombed and cellular detailing in lead pencil and India ink. It spreads across backgrounds or encases human contours, adding to the exquisitely surreal tone of the work. Combined with distorted and disconnected body parts, the motif makes for haunting compositions that seem to have grown out of nightmares and hallucinations.

Among many striking works was the enigmatic Coeur de boeuf (Steer's Heart, 1962) and Les Otages (The Hostages, 1964-65), an ethereal series of soft-spoken washes of color and pattern. Deux's mesmerizing self-portraits in lead pencil from the '80s and '90s present an anguished multiplicity of selves. Often depicting fetal forms entangled within adult bodies, these drawings are characteristically ambiguous and strangely beautiful.

-- Debra Wolf

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