In ‘The Secret Life of Colour’, I bring together a group of early works by Raymond Zoilé (1923–2004): gouaches and pastels from the 1940s, silent witnesses to a young artist shaping his visual language in a turbulent decade. Revisiting these early works today feels like a discovery or perhaps a rediscovery: an oeuvre that remained at the margins of Antwerp’s art history, yet one in which remarkable sensitivity and modernist clarity were present from the very beginning.

Why Zoilé never showed his art remains an intriguing question. His untouched studio an interior scarcely entered for decades suggests a man who lived two parallel lives: the thoughtful professional during the day, and the quiet, urgent painter at night. This tension between visibility and withdrawal forms an unexpected undercurrent when looking at his early work, which now steps into public view for the very first time.

Zoilé studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in the same class as Vic Gentils, who would later help shape the Belgian avant-garde. While Gentils moved toward assemblage, Zoilé sought a quieter form of modernity: restrained, observant, layered. His early gouaches and pastels echo the colour fields, reductions and atmospheric experiments of the interwar period, drawing from modernist tendencies one or two decades earlier, while also bearing traces of the European unrest that marked the 1940s. An intimate chromatic sensibility unfolds in these works a first whisper of what would become his mature artistic voice.

Alongside this artistic trajectory, Zoilé held a significant professional role: as head of window display and visual design at the Grand Bazar, he was for decades responsible for the store’s entire visual identity from displays and seasonal concepts to spatial scenography. That he showed almost none of his artistic work during this time seems less the result of hesitation or lack of ambition than the consequence of a deeply personal rhythm in which the public and the private remained strictly separate. The combination of conceptual clarity, orderliness and a refined sense of visual rhythm forms a compelling undercurrent in his early drawings: the same precision, the same spatial awareness, the same instinct to bind clarity and poetry.

Zoilé painted in silence, for himself, throughout his life. His studio, found untouched and completely intact, contains works ranging from his earliest experiments to his final years a private, vibrant world that never seemed intended for public view. The Secret Life of Colour reveals an artist in formation and an oeuvre ready to be reread today with the curiosity and softness it deserves.