Roger Somville is a modern Belgian painter. He defends realism against a modern abstract art, which is a way to unhumanize the human being. He was a member of the comminist party, and he wrote once: "The Creation of a public art praising men's life and work, their fights, their grieves, their joys, their victories, and their hopes; an art made for everybody to carry it there where men pass and live."
He is one for the foremost national, or international, exponents of the realist movement. And, paradoxically, he is one of the most contested, often by those who know his work least. For Roger Somville offers a double challenge: to the social "stablishment", in his political ideas and to the artistic equivalent, in his conception of art.