He is like Ferdinand Hodler or B cklin or Munch, a singular talent from the North prized mostly in his own country because his work is mostly there. A show like this is rectifying for that reason. The drawings roam over the map, but even when they're bad they are fascinatingly bad, the sign of a good artist. While you are in the show you may think of Bu uel and underground comic books, among other things, because so much of what you might call high modernist camp is traceable to Ensor. Sometimes, when his drawings are good, they can be so thick and intricate that you may barely decipher them at first.
Images turn up in the shadows.
You'll probably have to look twice before you find it. But then there it is, like an apparition. To other drawings, which started out as sketches of ordinary objects a fireplace, a piano, a clock Ensor later added squiggles and figures. They're Rorschachs of his imagination. The drawings became denser the more associations he piled on.