Les Toits 1954 - 1955

Fernand Léger's "Les Toits" is a dance of lines and colours depicting rooftops, probably made with gouache or watercolour. Imagine Léger, stepping back, squinting, adjusting his vision of the urban landscape into simple forms. The black outlines are bold, assertive—they define the buildings and trees with a stark, graphic quality. I can almost feel the scratch of the pen or brush as it moved across the paper. There’s a tension between the flatness of the colours and the implied depth of the architectural forms. The yellow triangle, like a rogue patch of sunlight, disrupts the composition. What’s that doing there? Léger’s playing with us, pushing the boundaries between representation and abstraction. He’s in conversation with the cubists but doing his own thing. It makes me think about other artists who were finding new ways of seeing the world through geometry and colour. Painting’s a process of trying to find new languages, and each artist builds on what came before, messing with it, and making something new!