As a loyal and recognised museum sponsor, BNP Paribas Foundation seeks to preserve and to help increase the awareness of museums’ treasures by supporting the restoration of their masterpieces through its “BNP Paribas for Art” program. During the past fifteen years, this program has enabled the restoration of over two hundred works held in French museums and other museums abroad.

To mark the donation of over six hundred works and archives of the painter Eugene Leroy (Tourcoing 1910 – Wasquehal 2000) by his sons Jean-Eugene and Jean-Jacques Leroy to the Eugene Leroy Museum of Fine Arts in Tourcoing, the BNP Paribas Foundation has chosen to contribute to this event by supporting the restoration of forty-five paintings by the artist.

Painting in oils on canvas, Eugene Leroy’s technique was to tirelessly rework the composition that he had completed the day before. He worked on some of his canvasses for over twenty years. The artist sought luminescence of colour; he wanted his coloured paints to become a source of light themselves. This unremitting quest led him to construct his works with a succession of coloured layers. As the years passed and more and more material built up on the canvas, the canvas became unable to support the coloured layer. Another unique aspect of the works of Eugene Leroy is that the paint extends beyond its support, giving it its own physical structure. They all have roughly rectangular shapes, but with very irregular edges.

The painter said of his work: “Everything I’ve ever attempted to paint has been to achieve this, almost a kind of absence, so that the painting is completely itself.”

Notice that the restored paintings will be presented as part of a temporary exhibition scheduled for Autumn 2010, which will be devoted to the work of this artist.