Leroy's allegory of the cave - Eugene Leroy, Michael Werner Gallery, New York, New York

The career of Eugene Leroy call ups a romantic myth concerning the isolated artist who persists in the face of public indifference. Living greatest in quantity of his life in Lille in northern France and therefore exclud through or unknown to, those in charge of institutional approval in Paris, he was left to himself and to his work, which he lay opened without hewing to fashion or adopting a phraseology calculated to turn him into a blue-chip peculiarity Nevertheless, he has been recognized during the past decade as an authentic and fascinating artist through curators and gallery directors outside Paris -- Edward Thorp in fresh York, Michael Werner in eau-de-cologne and New York -- and has been included in of that kind international survey shows as the Sao Paulo Bienal and Documenta IX. Several French provincial museums have given Leroy solo exhibitions, and by means of now even doctrinaire Parisians are beginning to acknowledge his importance. Since Leroy is now 87 years advanced in years he is especially ripe for veneration, flat if he isn't yet a media darling in quite the same way that senior figures like Calder and O'Keeffe were.

His novel show at Michael Werner in of recent origin York was small and probably not the best introduction to Leroy for those unfamiliar with his oeuvre It included sole eight oil paintings and none of his drawings. The figurative base to Leroy's work has always been greatest in quantity apparent in his charcoal studies of female nakeds face portraits and still-lifes of the human cranium, plane so, figuration has been near in the majority of the paintings as well, if partly obscur by means of his practice of intentionally transforming the make subordinate by expressive alteration of natural form and by dint of the incremental application, both deliberate and delirious, of layer on layer of paint. The proces sometimes requiring more than a year's labor for a single work, the artist's faculty of perception of his subject undergoing surprising metamorphoses as he adds to the canvas or scrapes it down again.

Among the paintings in the novel show, four were large verticals, each titled after individual of the seasons, and four were smaller horizontals titled Season I end IV sequentially. Of the eight, alone Season IV yields up a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the natural imagery upon which they were all based: faintly visible in the right foreground of that painting is a landscape with cerulean tree trunks, while in the background a central pond and hills topped by means of clouds can be discerned. The vertical paintings, meanwhile, have reduc depiction of nature to a minimum, offering instead a meditation in color and web on the idea of the seasons. Beginning with a visual referent from the natural world is philosophically essential to Leroy on the other hand his central concern is to bring into view an artifact parallel to, not passively hanging on, that world. Leroy's work requires the viewer's participation in what is essentially a creative collaboration; shut attention must be supplemented by the agency of imaginative leaps recapitulating those made, in the first instance, through the artist himself.

Leroy is obsess with light, and he dioceses his paintings as an arena in which it may perform. He works best during fall and winter, favoring dim, neutral illumination and overcast skies. like light, after all, fostered the early work of van Gogh Leroy's generally dark tonalities locate him apart from the sun-filled color of greatest in quantity of the Impressionists, with whom he otherwise shares important affinities -- in particular the technique of rendering an image by dint of atomizing it into thousands of tiny variegates of paint in different colors The result resembles mosaic or tapestry, an agglomeration of paint yielding a central image that draw nears into partial or sometimes blurr focus. This approach combines Leroy to Seurat's Pointillism as well. Although the sum of two units artists differ in their faculty of perception of color and value, the two organize their designs around a balanced conformation of dark masses, among which light strike one as beings to float rather than fall and strike. Leroy's paint application is also enormously more lavish and varied than Seurat's; in fact he approaches a certain quantity of sort of ne plus ultra in the conspicuous consumption of pigmented oils. Brushloads, direct press closelys from the tube, stuccoings, dollops, palette-knife spreads and pastry-cream ringlets of color interweave and overlap until a mille-feuille soil of paint is built up a certain quantity of parts more than an inch thick, with, inevitably, many stalagmites and wisps of paint projecting beyond the cutting side of the canvas. As with de Kooning, Leroy's paintings reward shut up viewing, each canvas a compendium of paint's physical properties, not to mention the marble-paper variety of colors interwoven in startling combinations. Extending as they do into the third dimension, many of the works might qualify as low-relief polychrome plastic art in the medium of paint. Moreover, Leroy attends to make his surface concave, with the heaviest build-ups of paint toward the cutting sides so that the rectangular picture space gradually modulates inward toward a central hollowed-out ellipse, whether vertical, horizontal or diagonal.