Roger Lersy

Abstract Cubist Seascape Lithograph by Roger Lersy

circa 1950

Roger Lersy is a French painter, lithographer, and composer, born in Paris on April 2, 1920, and died in Orsay on June 22, 2004. He belongs to the School of Paris and the Young Painting movement. Roger Lersy was born in the 18th arrondissement of Paris on April 2, 1920. Studying the piano from his earliest childhood, likewise "beginning to draw on his father's lap", Roger Lersy, son of a decorator, enters after his schooling and for three years at the École supérieure des arts appliqués Duperré in Paris. Having then begun to paint, living at 19, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, he then worked as a decorator, however between 1950 and 1954 pursuing higher musical studies with Noël Gallon, continuing after 1954 – the year when the galleries, both in Paris and abroad, begin to exhibit it regularly —, to practice painting (canvases, watercolors, tapestry cartoons) and music together. From 1961 to 1968, Lersy lived in the United States. From 1970 he went on to personal exhibitions, among others in Paris, London, Geneva, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York. Roger Lersy was initiated into the first degree of Freemasonry in the Ancient Scottish Rite and Accepted in 1979, in the Grand Val Lodge, meeting at the time in Perreux-Sur-Marne, Orient de Sucy-en-Brie (later Orient of Créteil, Val-de-Marne) of the Grand Lodge of France. Leading two careers at the same time, Roger Lersy has left paintings that are seen as all "rhythms and quivers". In his paintings, the motif develops along a melancholy line with well-concerted chords, pauses, and cadences. One could define Lersy as a "baroque expressionist". For Bernard Dorival, Roger Lersy is, along with Gabriel Dauchot, Jean Commère, and Raymond Guerrier, among "the most noted champions of this expressionism which follows on from the misery of Bernard Buffet”. Lesser-known parts of Roger Lersy, he was also interested in mosaics, sculpture, stained glass and undertook creations for public and private buildings. Roger Lersy does not belong to "Musicalism" in painting in the sense that the word "Musicalism" historically refers to a group of painters formed around Henri Valensi from 1932. But if we admit with Raymond Bayer in his review of aesthetics that "Musicalism is not a school but a doctrine of art, a body of knowledge constituting a system", the term can then, by extension, be compared to Roger Lersy in whom music and aesthetic effects (his arabesques and hatched lines of incredible virtuosity for one, his backgrounds of streaks always of spectacular virtuosity for the other), remain in permanent contact. Roger Lersy died in Orsay (Essonne) on June 22, 2004.