Joseph Lacasse is an eminent abstract painter of the École de Paris. When in 1912 Kandinsky published his manifesto about abstract art, he was unaware that his theories had already been put into practice by the Belgian teenager Lacasse, a worker in the local stone quarries. Whereas Kandinsky reached abstraction through solid intellectual preparation, Lacasse found himself on the same road through pure intuition.

In 1925, Lacasse left his native Belgium to settle in Paris in the Impasse Ronsin in a studio next to that of Brancusi. Lacasse befriended Robert Delaunay whose art was crucial to his coloristic development. Soon he developed his own style which is characterised by his continued obsession with the depiction of the spectrum of light. communicated through colour, which runs over the surface, a sensitivity, which has become matter through the miracle of plastic creation at last made visible.

Over the years, Lacasse deepened his research into the reflection of sunlight as it was refracted into a prism by an embedded mineral of a stone. His mystical beliefs led him to search for a supernatural union with the Universe and made him strive for ultimate purity in his work.

The works of Lacasse are included in the following museums: Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Musée national d'art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Musée de Tournai, Tournai; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Eilat Museum, Eilat; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.