Seuphor is a writer-drawer and a drawer-writer. Drawing, like a game detached from any material contingency, has accompanied him all his life. As a child, one of his uncles gave him a box of colors and he began to reproduce what he saw. His family went so far as to sell his paintings, which he never recognized as having any artistic value. As a young man, he worked in an architect’s office, but writing was his main occupation. However, his friends were as much poets as visual artists. His admiration knew no bounds when he encountered the painting and philosophy of Mondrian.
In love with freedom, his hand relaxed his mind, expressing with lightness what his intellect ignored. From the end of the 1920s onward, drawing never left him.
The few examples on display here are a tiny window opening onto the sensitive depths of a being whose life sang, vibrated, and unfolded from him, even in the most difficult moments, as evidenced by the series of drawings made on his hospital bed at the Pitié-Salpêtrière in October 1950. The variety of forms is infinite, and some of them can be found, magnified, in his lacuna drawings.

Sophie Berckelaers