Henri Michaux’s works on paper in red chalk (sanguine) around 1942 occupy a unique place in the artists ouevre as only around 15 drawings from this period are known.

Created during the dark years of the Second World War, these drawings reflect a heightened inwardness and a restless search for new forms of expression. The red chalk, sanguine, with its earthy red tones, allowed Michaux to register gesture, pressure, and speed with particular immediacy. The medium suited his interest in the raw transmission of psychic states, producing marks that feel less composed than released—traces of movement rather than representations of stable forms.

In these works, Michaux often abandoned conventional figuration in favor of hybrid signs that hover between writing, drawing, and bodily notation. The red chalk lines pulse, cluster, and scatter across the paper, suggesting animated figures, nervous crowds, or microscopic organisms without ever fully resolving into identifiable subjects. This ambiguity is central to Michaux’s project: he sought to bypass rational control and tap into what he called “inner space.” Rather than depicting external events, the drawings register agitation, confinement, and psychic turbulence, as if the violence of history were being translated into a private, gestural language.

On fragile sheets of paper, Michaux constructed a universe of signs that resist fixed meaning, anticipating his later experiments with ink, frenetic buzzing mescaline drawings, and invented scripts.