Jean Leyris (1939-)

Jean Leyris was born in England on June 24, 1939 to a French father, Pierre Leyris, an eminent translator of Anglo-Saxon and American literature, and an English mother, Elizabeth, known as Betty, a multi-talented artist (draughtswoman, musician, dancer). Just before war broke out, the family returned to France. The war years were divided between Paris and Savoie. Around the age of six, Jean was sent to England. His godmother, a cousin of his mother, took charge of his education. He spent his entire youth on the other side of the Channel, not without a feeling of nostalgia for life with his parents, immersed in a stimulating intellectual, literary and artistic milieu both in Paris and in the countryside, where, for many years, writer, poet and painter friends were welcomed, including Pierre Klossowski and his brother Balthus. When he returned to Paris in 1964, Jean Leyris worked for a number of production companies before setting up his own production company in London with English partners, dedicated to cinema and live performance (theater, musicals).  

1976 marked a decisive turning point in Jean Leyris's career. At the age of 37, he broke with his career as a producer, in which he was not fulfilling his potential. He moved to Provence, captivated by the beauty of the land. Close to nature, he devoted himself to learning drawing and painting. In his practice, Matisse's painting challenged him profoundly. How to convey the feeling of space with flat colors distributed across the canvas. The composition of screens dates from this period, enabling him to break out of the "narrow" space of easel painting. These were a great success. After around ten years, he turned away from painting in favor of sculpture. His sculpture questions his own means of rendering the sensory real. How can we translate space, depth, transparency, matter, the thickness of things, emptiness, air, etc. into sculpture? Other artists have naturally ventured down this path before him, notably Alberto Giacometti, with whom he has an obvious close relationship.

Jean Leyris creates sculptures in the round, modelled in clay, mainly figures, which reveal themselves in space. Leyris's sculpture also follows another typology, neglected in the ^20th and ^21st centuries, that of bas-relief and high-relief, which responds to his need to "bring drawing into relief". Here, the artist develops subjects traditionally reserved for drawing and painting - mostly landscapes and still lifes. His landscapes are frontal visions in which the sensation of depth is conveyed by elements of relief and by the layering of planes - the ground, the trees, the sky. Trees are also an omnipresent motif in Jean Leyris' iconography, both in his drawings(Le Chêne, Le Tilleul à contrejour) and in his sculptures(Trois petits chênes sur un talus, Arbustes dans la garrigue). In his still lifes and interiors, the combination of frontality and depth creates an essential form of expressive tension. The tabletop on which the objects are arranged - a bowl of fruit, a book, a vase of flowers, etc. - evokes both flatness and depth. -(Les Artichauts), as do the lines of the parquet floor(Livre ouvert à l'oignon). Cézanne and Matisse are not far off.

Jean Leyris has been exhibiting regularly since 1979, when he held his first solo show. Today, his desire to work remains intact. He plans to return to the human figure without abandoning nature, which remains a major inspiration for him.