French painter Eugène Leroy died at 89 in Wasquehal, northern France, where he lived and worked. This abstract painter worked over fifty years in painstaking an effort to combine light and material laying thick pigments on the canvas. It often took him years to finish a work as he considered painting as a kind of primitive mud, the earth and the sea mixed together that he had to bring apart.
Leroy used to start from chaos and had to fight in order to express something tangible. Born in 1910 in Tourcoing, he only worked in northern France where he tried to capture its particular light, that of the sea, of the seasons and of its painters, like Rembrandt whose works triggered his decision to become an artist.
Leroy however was not indifferent to the light he discovered in many Venetian paintings and always tried to exhale the subtle tones of colours of his palette.
His works often evoked the rusty autumn colour of trees, the rotten appearance of dead leaves in winter or even the pearly brilliance of female flesh through the condensed layers of painting on his canvasses.
Leroy was much ignored during his career and was only discovered some twenty years ago thanks to Georg Baselitz who held him in high esteem. After several years during which he lived as a lonely man, Leroy became a star at 70.
He had studied painting at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Lille and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before settling in Groix, near Roubaix, in 1935. He first taught Latin and Greek in a college and travelled to Holland several times on his bicycle. Rembrandt brought him to art and influenced him much during the early years of his career when he produced portraits with chiaroscuro effects.
Throughout his career Leroy appeared to be questioning himself as if he had been permanently unsatisfied. Bernard Marcadé published a monography concerning this artist, now rated at $ 10,000 for 65 x 54 cm formats, in 1994.
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