Exhibition P. Leygonie, an unusual figurative painter

The exhibition brings together some sixty works by the artist, as well as personal objects and photographs belonging to the artist's family that have never been exhibited before. Organised by theme, it celebrates the work of an artist of Creusot roots who never claimed to belong to any particular school, even though Cézanne was his teacher and his work resonates with that of Nicolas de Staël, who overturned the distinction between figuration and abstraction.
So, even if he sometimes verges on abstraction, Pierre Leygonie remains a resolutely figurative artist. He transcends reality.
The exhibition highlights the recently destroyed mosaic he designed for the Lycée du Creusot (formerly the Jaurès site) in 1965, and then traces his various creative periods. During the first period, he mainly explored landscapes and still lifes on the motif; the second, known as the "red period", was characterised by an obsession with this colour and with the female body, which he "sculpted" with his knives, earning him the nickname of "painter of incandescence".
Finally, the third period, with an acclaimed but powerful return to the "skies and shores" of Brittany.