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Eugène Leroy's work is unique. Drawing from a broad range of sources – from the personal and topographical to past and current events – he produces art that is both existential and tactile. Layering paint on top of paint, he builds up slabs of pigment that weigh down the canvas. In fact, his canvases more closely resemble the sculpted topography of an artist's palette or a studio floor. This ninety-year-old painter from northern France looks to the immediate world around him; his works embody the claustrophobia, human presence, and dominating quality of the light of his small studio that is itself filled with paintings. Although Leroy's titles – Figure Noir (Dark Figure), Fin d' été au ciel bleu (End of Summer with Blue Sky), and Atelier 94/26 (Studio 94/26) – are clues to decipher his tangle of marks, these small paintings are not easily comprehended. Perhaps what is most compelling about this work is the accumulation itself. The brushstrokes and the globules of mixed and unmixed paint and the resulting crevices have their own presence. They tell a story of someone agonizing over the canvas, who obsessively returns day after day to make another mark, constantly reconsidering what came before.
Although Leroy paints classic subjects – still lifes, landscapes, interiors, portraits, and nudes – he is interested in the unmediated experience of a subject rather than a literal presentation of it. He works from his crowded, messy studio. A cot hides in one corner and one bright window illuminates the space. He regularly paints his wife and muse Marina Bourdoncle, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, and at times going about the chores of daily life. Instead of depicting Bourdoncle reclining impassively as a more traditional model, Leroy depicts her as active, moving around the apartment or reading classical literature to him. Similarly, the landscape for Leroy is not something to record from a distance; he says, "[It is] not as if I were doing a landscape but as if I were literally going out into nature and in a certain sense touching it. I used to go on my bicycle. I didn't have a car, and it's interesting that since I got one I've never experienced the countryside in the same way."1
Thus, to decipher the figure or object that inspired each configuration is less important. Rather it is the energy of each piece, the movement of paint, and the particular flashes of color that reveal the most. Large expanses of blue, white, and green run over twisted incrustations of pigment to evoke water in a rippling stream as clearly as the title
Poissons au bord de l'eau (Fish at the Water's Edge) describes. In Nu à la main blanche (Nude with White Hand), 1989, touches of pinkish mauve suggest skin and lines of white, a hand, while the vigor of the vertical and horizontal brushstrokes trace the presence and motion of a person drifting in space. In Debut d' été (Beginning of Summer), 1997, gray-blue captures the anticipation of the changing season. This painting, like his others, seizes seasonal and emotional spectrums, rather than discrete, identifiable images. Spending a great deal of time on each painting – sometimes up to ten years – Leroy records his experiences of the world over time.
As people and things are experienced in time, the land records its experiences in temporal layers that track a continually changing nature, its processes, and growth. In a similar manner, Leroy's accumulations of dried paint hold the textures of nature: autumn leaves on a forest floor, the kaleidoscopic mix of a coral reef, the clutter of a compost pile, or aerial views of distant lands. These paintings, like Atelier 94/26 (Studio 94/26), could even be thought of as low-relief sculptures, and recall topographic maps. Up to two inches thick, they can be conceived as miniature, three-dimensional representations of hills and valleys, water over ragged rock, erupting volcanoes.
Leroy's layering, however, is not only one of geological time but of cultural history. His paintings have elicited comparisons with works spanning the history of Western art, from the caves at Lascaux to the most contemporary conceptual pieces. His paintings are at once the basic marks of existence and a treatise on the evolution of painting. Leroy's sensuous application of paint and his love of the nude recall Rubens' penchant for flesh and all things bacchanalian. The darkness in Leroy's agitated surfaces suggests the religious transformations described in the paintings of the Spanish master El Greco. Although his appreciation of the subtle valuations of light, from one canvas to another, bring Rembrandt to mind, Leroy contends that what he takes from the Dutch master is his profound understanding of humanity. Leroy admires Toulouse-Lautrec for a similar quality, for "creating a figure in a representational plane and imparting life into it."2 Like the impressionists, Leroy represents a spontaneous and visceral response to reality with points, dabs, and dapples of color. The quality of his light, however, is closer to the dim, neutral illumination of the northern sky in van Gogh's early work. Leroy and Van Gogh were, in a sense, looking at the same sky: Leroy's home near Lille lies on the border of Belgium, the site of van Gogh's early paintings. Leroy's roots are in the Old World and its search for richness of experience, transcendence, and physical beauty.
Remarkably, he carries these values with him to the modern world of spontaneous and unmediated experience. As a twentieth-century expressionist, Leroy must create and find meaning in an increasingly complicated and troubled world. Like Willem de Kooning, he has focused his struggle on the constant redrawing of a standard motif: the female nude. In line with abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, he uses his canvas as a space for meditation and exploration. Leroy's work, moreover, mirrors the thick, materially loaded canvases of the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, whose work carries the weight of his country's anguished history. Like Gerhard Richter, another contemporary painter from Germany, Leroy deals with the existential angst of painting in the shadow of earlier masters by refusing to commit to figuration or abstraction.
These art-historical references also work on a personal level, as Leroy's paintings recall different experiences for different viewers. Our recollections of the past – personal as well as historical – are often as jumbled as Leroy's images. We recall memories not as discrete images, but as a stack of transparent overlays, viewed simultaneously. Once a series of memories is brought together, the original reality blends with what came before and what will follow. One can hope that by thinking more intently or by looking more closely, memories (like Leroy's paintings) will come into better focus. Leroy, however, knows the futility of recapturing a single, unaltered memory. In fact, he begins each painting by eliminating the stark white canvas, painting and scraping it until he has established a context from which he can then begin.
In the layered confusion that he paints, Leroy acknowledges the limits of human understanding. This artist welcomes and respects chaos. His many layers of paint, representing many layers of meaning and truth, speak to a uniquely contemporary view of the world. As a result, Leroy has two expectations: one, that the viewer vicariously experience his creation of the painting and two, that the viewer's interaction with the work is necessary for its ultimate completion. But unlike a number of contemporary artists, Leroy's quest contains no cynical irony. He does not distance himself from the image through false objectivity, recycled imagery, or conceptual formulas, but he dives right into the muck of experience in his search to find his own truth and beauty.
In apparent contradiction, Leroy's works are conceptual and sensual. Deeply reflective and spiritual, they are also profoundly about the material aspect of painting. Dark and tangled with meaning, they are clear expressions of humanity in all its confusion and desire. They express human presence, natural time, and the weight of history and culture, rich with contemporary doubt but anchored in an earlier world of accepted truth and optimistic certainty. Within the layers of his paintings, Leroy gives us the human experience in all its complexity.
CLAIRE SCHNEIDER
Assistant Curator
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
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Cover | Curator's Essay | Paintings | History | Bibliography | Credits