Guy Degobert studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He initially made realistic paintings with a romantically charged atmosphere. In 1947, he took up a job designing advertisements. Degobert left the advertising world in 1960 and became a full-time artist again. For several years, he painted in a lyrical abstract style in the spirit of Auguste Herbin, but never exhibited this work. In around 1965, his work underwent a metamorphosis under the influence of pop art. He exchanged abstraction for a realism that would become increasingly photographic.
Degobert primarily focused on the still life as a stand-alone genre. He made still lifes of the most banal things from our consumer culture, including sweets, bottles, canned food, matchboxes and tools. As an advertising designer, he had learned to create an aura around the most ordinary of objects. He enlarged small items and set them carefully against a white background. His clinical approach to painting created a distance that was closely connected to the American ‘deadpan’ variant of pop art. Moreover, he produced works that were highly reminiscent of those created by the American pop artists Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol.
Despite its strong ties with pop art, Guy Degobert's work is not considered to be part of this movement. He is categorised under hyperrealism or photorealism. Indeed, his paintings did not depart from directly observable reality, but from photos of that reality. Other Belgian photorealist painters were Roger Wittewrongel, Marcel Maeyer, Antoon De Clerck and Joseph Willaert. In America, hyperrealism, represented by figures such as Chuck Close, Richard Estes and Duane Hanson, flourished as a sequel to pop art. Unlike their American counterparts, European artists were more interested in the portrayal of consumerism – especially the photographic methods used by the mass media – than in the actual reality of the phenomenon. They explored, instead, the way in which it was depicted and manipulated by broadcasting and popular publishing.
In a virtuoso, illusionistic style, the photorealists strove to achieve the perfect detailed rendering of reality. At the same time, they wanted to create a convincing overall image. While the American painters did not intervene in the composition, the European ones did. They gave freer rein to their imagination. This is certainly the case with Guy Degobert’s still lifes, which include objects from the most diverse contexts. The aim of his associative image strategy, which was already frequently deployed in surrealism, was to appeal to our subconscious mind and our imagination.
