LEROY / TUCKER: L'incarnation du voir

When I decided to present the work of William Tucker to the French public, I immediately, as though through a natural or subconscious sequence, thought of the paintings of Eugène Leroy.

“If the body emerges with difficulty, it is by default – it goes without saying that this default is the imperative of this form of painting. It is because there is a primordial difficulty in seeing that there is a difficulty in representing, and this difficulty imposes the overload, the sedimentation. In so doing, it is painting that attempts to overcome its own failure, the failure to create a produced body – despite everything, a body – and this game in its perpetual renewal.” Reading these lines by Éric Suchère, it is hard to say whether they are about Tucker or Leroy.

Indeed, this impossibility strikes me as equally operational in both artists, along with the same fierce dedication. The acceptance of a battle lost in advance but the impossibility of abandoning the battlefield.

Isn’t the artist a kind of Saint Thomas figure, probing the flesh of the resuscitated Christ?
And, like the doubting apostle, as spectators before the bronzes of Tucker or the paintings of Leroy, we too are invited to enter into the image, to experiment with the sensations of the individual who doubts what he sees. As if sight were insufficient for attesting to the (resuscitated) presence of the painted or sculpted subject. Therein lies the miracle shared by these two artists. Truth is not born from the resuscitated subject but from his quest[n1] .

In both practices, sight gives way to touch, which invades the domain of the visible: sight becomes tactile. It is a matter of feeling with our eyes the texture of the bodies, the warmth of the colours, the crevices of the bronze, and thus of reproducing through sight the extreme experience of Saint Thomas’s touch.

It is as if the recovery of sight, of real presence, could only be achieved through matter itself.

Christophe Gaillard