Ronny Delrue

For Ronny Delrue, drawing is not merely a medium: it is a form of thought in motion. For decades he has practiced it as one might keep a journal, amassing pages where intuitions, glimmers of memory, and hypotheses of figures settle. His heads, often reduced to an outline and sometimes thickened with impasto, are neither portraits nor self-portraits; they inhabit that in‑between where the image becomes the site of a generic human presence—fragile, wavering. The series take shape through reworkings, pentimenti, and erasures that leave the traces of the process in plain view; the material—graphite, charcoal, paint—acts like a seismograph of attention, bringing emotion to the surface without illustrating it. This daily practice weaves together the intimate and the archetypal, memory and the possible, giving the act of drawing the value of a mental experience. Delrue does not seek likeness; he probes how an image comes into being, changes, and reorganizes, and how, in rubbing against the paper, thought finds its form. In this persistence, drawing becomes a laboratory where each attempt opens onto another, and where seeing is, above all, a way of questioning what lies behind the visible.

Ronny Delrue is a Belgian artist born in 1957 in Heestert, who lives and works in Ghent. A draftsman, painter and sculptor, he approaches drawing as a daily, introspective practice that explores memory, forgetting, and the emergence and disappearance of thought. His diverse body of work — drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations — reflects on humanity, the passage of time, and the fragility of consciousness.