Leroy + Leroy, and how the underlying contradiction always expresses itself - by Kevin Torck

The context of this text, which is this stream of words laying between images of L+L, forces me to say something about them. But first a story in which my grandfather is the protagonist.

During a certain period in history people started to eat ‘properly’. The higher class wanted to distinguish itself from the plebeians, so it attached a ‘serviette’ around the neck to avoid spilling food on their clothes. After a while the plebeians followed the example of the upper class and copied this behavior. The patricians shove their chairs backwards and laid the napkin on their lap. Also that behavior was soon adopted. Consequence?

To this day, the napkin hangs around grandfather’s neck during mealtime. In his will to distinguish himself from the mass, he went back to the form of that mass, the mass that progressed in its form to that of its own examples, the masters.

In modern art it went the same way. One artist wanted to distinguish himself from another, mostly from another aspect of his predecessor. Then, one wanted to distinguish himself, again mostly from another aspect of his predecessor. And so it goes on until everybody thinks, in his own mind, to be distinguished from another, mostly from another aspect of someone else.

However, for an outsider there is nothing more to see then a homogeneous whole that lost all sense. Unless we know who the predecessors were and from which aspect they distinguished themselves, the question rises if all this doesn’t act as a huge static pantomime, made up by artists, critics and traders, filling their own pockets. The central principle of modern art, the "distinguish yourself", reversed to its contrary:

By distinguishing yourself, you became banal

and in a museum you have to ask yourself if the brush is the cleaner’s or the artist’s.

In that perspective I see L + L’s paintings breaking. Out of itself, on its own, objects appear, due to itself, not due to a place in a series that came to its own contradiction. Form and meaning are one again and, contradiction by contradiction, the evolution went backwards. The pieces of art of the brothers possess value, without story or history. The value of sensibility, in the contemplation, in the immediate excitement it provokes. You don’t have to be an art-educated person, not a guide or an accompanying text. And that’s how, inevitably, you come to your own contradiction: in the banal, traditional artwork, the one who IS by its BEING, we distinguish ourselves from the rest, the aged rest, one that bounced against its own boundaries and that isn’t able to progress anymore. They just don’t get it yet.

DID YOU SEE LEROY + LEROY?

Kevin Torck