Working in a small town near Lille, far away from the hubbub of the Parisian scene, EUGÈNE LEROY had always been the center of his own universe. Painting the figure, yet almost erasing it with heavy layers of oil—so much of it that the canvases could barely hold the weight—the artist created a tectonic spectacle he simply called reality. By resisting the gaze, Leroy’s paintings evaded both aging and history itself, writes Fabrice Hergott on the eve of opening a major retrospective finally doing justice to the artist’s heroic stand.
