Sans-titre, 1975

Roger Lersy  

French painter born in 1920 in Paris. He is a painter, lithographer and composer. He died in Forges-les-Bains (Essonne) in 2004. He belongs to the School of Paris and to the Young Painting movement.

Studying the piano from his earliest childhood, Roger Lersy, son of a decorator, entered after his schooling and for a period of three years at the Superior School of Applied Arts Duperré in Paris. Having then started to paint, he then worked as a decorator, however between 1950 and 1954 pursuing higher musical studies with Noël Gallon, continuing after 1954 - the year when galleries, both in Paris and abroad, began to l '' exhibit regularly -, practice painting (canvases, watercolors, tapestries boxes) and music together.

From 1961 to 1968, Roger Lersy lived in the United States. From 1970 he had a series of personal exhibitions, among others in Paris, London, Geneva, Houston, Los Angeles and New York5. Roger Lersy was initiated into the first degree of Freemasonry at the old 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 de Créteil, Val-de-Marne) of the Grand Lodge of France, of which the actor Jean Franval was for a time the great provincial inspector.

Leading two careers at the same time, Roger Lersy left paintings which are seen all “of rhythms and tremors […] In his canvases, the motif develops in a melancholy line with well-concerted chords, pauses and cadences. One could define Lersy as a baroque expressionist ”. For Bernard Dorival, Roger Lersy is with Gabriel Dauchot, Jean Commère and Raymond Guerrier among "the most noted champions of this expressionism which is part of the continuation of Bernard Buffet's wretchedness".

Lesser known parts of Roger Lersy, he was also interested in mosaic, sculpture, stained glass and undertook creations for public (town halls, colleges, etc.), private (companies) and religious 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 Revue d ' aesthetic 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 an “incredible virtuosity” for one, its backgrounds of streaks always of a “spectacular virtuosity” for the other), remain in permanent bond.

Roger Lersy's son, François Lyres, is also a designer, painter and musician.