The Disks
Fernand Léger
FERNAND LÉGER, 1918. OIL ON CANVAS.
Léger’s paintings are not abstract. Though they do not seek to imitate life, they create an equivalence to it, a modern view of a modern matter that reveals truth and accuracy in it’s portrayal with each deepening look. Years working in the French Engineer Corps during the war introduced the artist to the cutting edge of technology and mechanisation, and he understood that modernity was most readily expressed through these mediums. Léger saw an inevitability to the confluence of man and technology, as modern advancements changed the look of the world, so too would they change the make up of humans and his paintings are more accurate to the experience of burgeoning modernity than any photorealistic work. The men if the left of this painting disappear into the cogs and machines, inseparable and indistinguishable from the metal that moves around them, save for their pronounced greyness in the face of bright colours. The war had only just ended and Léger did not see the world he depicted as a utopia, he saw it simply as a state of the present, and of things to come.