Roger Greisch was born in Stockem-Heimsch, in 1917. Self-taught thanks to an early interest in draughtsmanship, he dedicated his professional career to teaching the discipline he fell in love with as a child. He became a schoolteacher in the Our valley and a drawing teacher in his native town’s School of Decorative Arts.
Griesch’s artistic talents were first recognised during personal exhibitions at Serge Goyens de Heusch’s Galerie Armorial, a local institution with which he sustained a 12-year partnership. Between the gallery walls, he crossed paths with notable contemporary figures such as Louis Van Lint, Berthe Dubail, Roger Dudant, Lismonde, Simonetta Jung, Jean Milo, Jean Rets, and Suzanne Thienpont.
Greisch’s particular brand of abstraction, specifically that which he reached in the 1980s and 1990s after progressively distancing his style from figuration, garnered considerable praise for the relationship it entertained with the spectator. His carefully constructed paintings refuse simplistic allure to weave a far more subtle, educated and poetic connection. As his friend Serge Goyens put it: ‘Greisch confers strength, emotion and coherence to his paintings, at times through their supple allusive geometry, at times through the formal rigour of his measured tachism. The painter is unparalleled when it comes to organising the pictorial space according to subtle and inventive graphics that support coloured planes rhythmed by more vibrant accents, judiciously chosen for their chromatic harmony. Faced with the accomplishment of these ‘landscapes’ that compose the paintings, one considers the constructive touch-based colour modulations, individualised by rounded or rectilinear segments. Thanks to the plastic resources of his imagination and his technical poise, Greisch was constantly able to find the renewal that confers on his painting a uniquely personal poetic charge.’
Roger Greisch passed away in Bütgenbach in 1999.
