"Delvaux turned the universe into a woman's empire, always the same as the one who reigns over the heart's working-class districts."André Breton (1)
Feminine nudes are central in work by Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Though this Belgian painter discarded Surrealism's aesthetic stances and policy, he had been associated with that movement since the 1930s. L'Escalier (1946) compiles a few of his work's original hallmarks, including the architectural decor, dream-like mood, and naked women with sleepwalking gazes. It diffuses the "poetic atmosphere" that this artist sought (2).
The women that Paul Delvaux painted look like something out of a dream, lingering between movement and stillness, between erotic nudity and the melancholy of absence. They split into two women to unleash men's desire. Here, two of them are strolling around an empty palace, crossing paths and walking away from each other, offering up their naked bodies in a mirror-like effect. One is blonde, the other a brunette. We see one from the front the other from the back, but they are both the same woman from different angles.
The serpentine line is characteristic of Mannerism that inspires this painter. Here, it breathes life into the women's airy demeanour and graceful gestures. In the elegant posture, the sanctioned nudity and the varying tones of the Three Graces, these modern visions emerge as genuine fantasies and multiply ad-infinitum.
The sensual, sculpted, reflected or projected silhouettes fill every shot in a strangely disturbing realm, which springs from the taciturn decor and timeless architecture of Chirico, whose work lastingly marked Delvaux.
The voluptuous nakedness, generous curves and pulsating flesh of the tendered bodies singularly and sharply contrast with the cold hues and overpowering rigidity of the incongruous double perspective and elusive focal point. In the heart of a marble city where clocks have stopped ticking and that exudes duality, Delvaux's women undergo metamorphoses from flesh to stone, from radiant to dark, making their way inside and outside, in the shadow or in the light.
(1) André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris, Gallimard, 1965), p. 81.
(2) Barbara Emerson, Delvaux (Paris, Albin Michel, 1985), p. 15.
