Bernard Dorival,
Ancien conservateur du Musée National d'Art Moderne
[...] he created works that, transcending those ephemeral categories – abstraction, figuration – , are mainly poertic works , [...] wich allow him to recover under a veil of luminous limpidity, the apprehension he has of the mystery of the world et that he freely expesses, out of the clichés of all the clans, on a registery that is "above".
[...] Participating of the cosmos like the miseries of our lives, a gave us all his Being on a way all the more convincing that he did it with modesty, half-words.
[...] nothing in his art, is imperative. Everything proposes the non-said and plays a more important role that what is says in it. Free, he leaves to his public thir freedom, wich is to respect them [...]
[...] Magic, thta's maybe the word that reports the best way his art, a magic that is the fruit of a quality soul, a well born soul, a Lord soul. So he takes place aside all those Lords, too many, whose too short existence has, since many centuries, lined the french painting history.[...]
Extract of the catalog published by the Brou Museum (1997)
Texts of Olivier Debré, Bernard Dorival, Itzhak Goldberg, Jean-Jacques Lerrant et Marie-Françoise Poiret.
Olivier Debré
His work on paper and on wood, sober and touching, spontaneous and builded, widely justifies the tribute made to him today. By the refinement of colours and the liveliness of his gest, Laurent Royer is incontestably amongst the best painters of his generation.
Extract of the catalog published by the Brou Museum (1997)
Texts of Olivier Debré, Bernard Dorival, Itzhak Goldberg, Jean-Jacques Lerrant et Marie-Françoise Poiret.
Denys Condé
One has to see again and again this calm and dazzling work. Impressive serie by its silence, its depth and its strength. Everything has the mark of a young self-command and a precocious maturity ; and that his the mark of the true creator – artist or poet – to be mature at the youngest age.
Extracts of the catalog "Hommage à Laurent Royer", AMAC, Chamalières (2004)
Marie-Josée Mondzain
This radical work completely found the time to come true and to cross its singular road without leaving us in the feeling of the incompletion. There is on the contrary a sort of perfectly registered cycle, in a non linear time which ignores the death.
Laurent Royer went through the blues of the sky, the live charcoals and the ashes of the earth to go meeting meeting the man at his term. His plastic adventure reaches the completeness with a dazzeling maturity. When the face brings out of the shadow, he has already been prepared in the hasardious folding of the Earth and the sky and the sky ;the threshold of its apparition consists in the solid embrasure of the azure and bricks which will be henceforth his house, the place of its birth.
There is so many force and joy in the fighting spirit rigour of this work that I can only testify of the hope I draw of this world that didn't gobbled him up yet, will never gobble us up.
Extracts of the catalog "Laurent Royer" - Mairie du VIème arrondissement de Paris (2000)
Texts of Marie-Josée Mondzain
