“Well, I would like to touch the painting one day. Just touch it.”- Eugène Leroy, 1979
The post-war period in France saw a resurgence of abstraction with the Second School of Paris. However, another path emerged in parallel, that of figurative art centered on the human figure and fueled by existentialist questions. While Eugène Leroy's work can largely be placed in the latter category, his artistic approach remains highly personal and unique. The artist kept his distance from the artistic debates of the time on abstraction and figuration, preferring a path marked by encounters with the old masters and a focus on his contemporaries.

The painting is structured by the brushstroke: “Drawing is the gesture. Capturing a gesture. Suspending a gesture. Yet, in the end, the gesture almost always disappears,” says the artist. While the materiality of Leroy's work, its sensory and sensitive dimension, is striking, there is nevertheless something elusive about his painting. The presence of the human figure remains at the bottom of an earthy material, giving the impression of a real struggle by the artist with the material to capture an impression that always remains blurred.

Leroy's keen sense of color and light stems from his in-depth study of the old masters—his work is influenced by Rembrandt, whose work he encountered at a young age. He then turned his attention to the Venetians, whom he always viewed from his own perspective. But he was also attentive to the work of modern artists: in this profusion of color and texture, there is something of Monticelli, Van Gogh, and Chaïm Soutine, as well as the English artists Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach—the human presence that escapes the gaze of the former, the solid, textured impasto of the latter.