*1917, Paris, FR – †1981, Malakoff (Hautes-des-Seines), FR
It might be the story, back in ’72, of a stroller stumbling upon the construction site of the Centre Pompidou in the Beaubourg neighborhood of Paris. In the forest of colorful cranes, gleaming necks seemed to rise up toward the sky. The timing was right, because the stroller wanted the whole world to rise up, to make that world more livable. Artists, like birds, can nest pretty much anywhere. “My visions are based on nature,” he wrote in his notebooks. Space, the thrust of color, the deployment of energy – those were his concerns at the time. But how to render this quiet explosion? “Art hangs by a thread, the thread of feeling,” he would repeat over and over. How to convey that feeling, which precedes thought? How to express, above and beyond the vast construction site, the spirit it raised? The answer was The Cranes of Beaubourg.1
Viewing the work „DIAGONALE“ on display, the viewer is assailed by an imaginary energy. In this work, Jean Legros places the colours and the surface proportions together in such a way that it inevitably creates an impression of extreme pressure on the diagonal, intercepted by a white, almost fragile-looking counter pressure. For this pictorial statement, Legros could not have conceived a more perfect composition of the image.
Jean Legros bei www.lahumiere.com