Roger Kathy
Born in 1934.
Died in 1979.
Roger Kathy was a Belgian painter whose artistic trajectory unfolded in Switzerland, particularly in the canton of Aargau. A self-taught artist, he learned to paint through books and through contact with works seen in museums. This independent path helps to explain the diversity of an oeuvre that cannot be reduced to a single manner.
His paintings from the late 1950s are non-figurative and, in their energy, close to “action painting”. Other works subsequently give full prominence to recognisable motifs: ports, landscapes, cities and figures. The transition between these registers invites us to observe, behind the subject, the way in which the brushwork constructs space and animates the surface.
The titles of two oil paintings preserved in an auction catalogue, New York – Fifth Avenue and New York – East River, recall the painter’s interest in expansive urban views. Their differing formats also suggest that the spectacle of the city can be approached at several scales. This reading of the works remains an invitation to look at them, not a fixed stylistic chronology.
Kathy exhibited in various Swiss venues: an exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus is documented in 1971, and a poster attests to his presentation at the Musée de l’Athénée in Geneva in 1976. His work thus circulated between the artistic scenes of German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland. Kathy is the name under which Roger Thys signed his life as a painter; it makes it possible to distinguish his work from that of the artist Kathy Thys, born Susi Bill.
To rediscover his paintings is to follow a research process in which the abstract impulse and attention to places coexist without becoming fixed in a formula.
