Introduction to Eugène Leroy

About the exhibition "Eugène Leroy - Peindre" (Eugène Leroy - Painting), on view until 28 August at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.

The paintings by Eugène Leroy (1910-2000), which have returned to the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris thirty-four years after the exhibition that brought them to the attention of the French public, make one think that oil painting still has things to say and mysteries to reveal. Some thought it had been explored from top to bottom, as Hector Obalk reminds us in a 1989 text published this month by the contemporary art magazine Art Press. But no.

To read this art historian and critic, actor and director of major shows that have been on view in Paris for the past two years, one is of course plunged into an abyss of learned reflections on the question of whether or not abstraction exists. He does not hesitate to take issue with the reasoning of formalists who claim that the figure is a negligible component in pictorial art. He does not hide the fact that he was sometimes flabbergasted by the contrast between fairly precise titles and the representation he had before his eyes. He wondered whether or not it was an abstract painting.

Nevertheless, in this singular work that has gained international recognition thanks to Georg Baselitz, in this transcendental materialism, in this beautiful retrospective of some 150 paintings, the human body is indeed there, emerging. And which seems, unlike a Chaïm Soutine or a Georges Rouault, to exude an absolute serenity.