The Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris is devoting an important retrospective to Eugène Leroy (1910-2000). This exhibition will bring together approximately one hundred and fifty works (paintings and graphic works), significant of the evolution of the artist's work.
Since his beginnings, Eugène Leroy has always sought to capture the essence of painting without losing the emotion that makes it possible. "All I have tried to do in painting is to arrive [...] at a kind of absence, so that the painting is totally itself", commented the artist in 1979. Each canvas presents itself to him as a real battlefield where image and matter confront each other. Conceiving painting as a surface in depth, he brings together, layer after layer, all the momentary impressions created by the motif. Endlessly reworked until the subject almost disappears, Eugène Leroy's paintings are open to endlessly renewed readings.
Eugène Leroy has always referred to the old masters and has revisited classic iconographic themes such as nudes, self-portraits and landscapes. Beyond a retrospective, the thematic structure of the exhibition highlights the complexity of a long process of creation and pictorial research.
