Jules Schmalzigaug, Composition in Blue, Yellow and Red

by Atelier Liesjes

On a cream-coloured sheet of paper, loose patches of colour float: cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, vermilion and deep black, irregular in shape and with soft, blurring edges. On the left and in the centre, they clump together into a swirling mass; in the top right, they drift apart into isolated islands. Beneath the paint, a pencil drawing remains visible: fine lines suggesting dancing figures – a profile, a raised arm, a hunched back. At the heart of the sheet lies a dense network of red and blue dots, like a shower of confetti. In the bottom right-hand corner is the signature in pencil, small and written at an angle. The sheet is a laboratory. Here, Schmalzigaug explores how colour and movement can function without a narrative: no scene, no horizon, only rhythm. The watercolour bleeds into the paper, whilst in other places the gouache remains opaque and matt, so that the whole breathes like skin. The unpainted edges of the paper remain visible, so that the composition appears to hang freely in space and the patches of colour are not framed by anything. The style is futuristic and divisionist, akin to the work of Boccioni and Severini, but with a looser and more playful touch than theirs. The theme is movement itself, the disintegration of the figure into colour, and the atmosphere is cheerful and exploratory, as if the sheet were still in the midst of the thought process.
Jules Schmalzigaug (Antwerp 1882 – The Hague 1917) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and moved to Paris in 1912, where he met the Italian Futurists and embraced their ideas on dynamism and colour. He is regarded as the only Belgian painter to have experienced the Futurist movement from within. His body of work is small and precious, as he died at the age of thirty-four. An ethereal, colourful piece for a wall where modern art can catch the light.