Lichaam van een man in een landschap met paarden 1877 - 1930

Henri de Groux made this lithograph of a man’s body in a landscape with horses, but when, I don’t know. It feels like the product of an intense inner world, where marks are born out of gesture and emotional force. The tonal range in this piece is incredible, going from almost white to near black. I love how the artist uses the lithographic crayon to build up these dense, dark passages, like the shadowy foreground. I feel the weight of the material itself, the graininess of the stone, as if the image is emerging from some primordial ooze. If you look closely at the body of the man, you can almost feel the way Groux has rendered the ribcage, the soft modelling of the abdomen. It puts me in mind of Odilon Redon. Like Redon, Groux embraces a dreamlike ambiguity that lets your mind wander. The horses are barely visible, and they're almost like ghosts. And is the man sleeping? Or dead? We’re left to interpret the scene ourselves.