Post-war France saw a resurgence of abstraction with the Second School of Paris. Nevertheless, another path, that of a figuration that places the human figure at the center, nourished by existentialist questioning, emerged in parallel. While Eugène Leroy's work can largely be placed in the latter category, his artistic approach remains highly personal and singular. The artist stays far away from the artistic debates of the time on abstraction and figuration, preferring a path punctuated by encounters with the old masters, as well as a look at his contemporaries.

In Leroy's work, a unique fusion of figuration and abstraction takes place: thick layers of paint structure the entire canvas, giving it a solidity of its own, a laborious, textured appearance. Leroy's themes are often classical - nudes, landscapes, portraits - offering a pretext for painting. Every Leroy canvas is distinguished first and foremost by its technique: taking several colors with the brush, without prior mixing, he applies them directly to the canvas. The successive layers end up superimposed, blending together in unexpected ways, as patches of color merge with volume, breaking away from the two-dimensionality of the surface. The subject is lost in this magma of impasto, becoming the painting itself. More intense, pure accents of color emerge on the surface, above darker hues in the depths, a direct result of the technique employed.