metal on metal Urral 37" x 62"
For many years, his enthusiastic passion and effort have influenced his solitude and became weapons with which he faced his own ambiguity, which was in conflict with that of the others. This solitary battle was never supposed to be a blame on the others. It was the consequence of his internal need to keep a certain distance and to take any risk, having as only assurance his work and his profession. He has designed a magical circle in the feverish atmosphere of Paris, which protects his artistic authenticity and instinct and allows him to produce the miracle of fire and of liquid metal in a small apartment in Paris.
He is intrigued by the hermetic language of fire and metal. This language becomes apparent only gradually to the attentive eye of the visitor. The existence of light and shade identifies itself with a nocturnal intimacy: these two elements fascinate the visitor's glance, who, as the night approaches, finally understands the range of gray and black shades. Leunens has experienced the night in a material way. His early works contain the silence of lunar landscapes and the impossibility of "cats of the night". Later on, the soot of the flames has bewitched the paper, while the reflections of the metal allow the relief and sculpture monotypes to become alive.
His hands of a painter have got used to the instinct of fire and metal. These media concretize space by means of an internal light, just as had been the case earlier with the oil paintings. The transmutation takes place before our eyes and, when touching the metal sheet, our hand is surprised to find it smoother than fine linen and of an unbelievable depth. The traces of the artist's effort have disappeared: after the physical effort of planing, the noise of the hammers and the stress caused by a daring adventure, the silence of the achieved work is taking over, just like a rest in a piece of music. A sign is discretely attached to that silence; thus the eye can reach and enter the interior space, which is harmoniously moving between light and shadow and is propagated through the movement of the spectator. Neither its mystery nor the secret of the last touch are revealed by the simple balance; the hand is always directing the liquid metal, just like it had directed the oil painting, remembering the former efforts. It has stopped the moving at the ultimate limit, where the language becomes confused and loses its power of expression. The image evoked by the sign dissolves in the material. The danger of an intentional figuration has been avoided in favor of a certain hermeticism. The technique is controlled by feeling, which itself improves and controls the instinct. An uninterrupted fire unites man and his work; a bond that becomes even tighter due to the pleasure of creating and the enthusiasm, which are the basis of Guy Leunens' work: they become the characteristics of his work.
metal on metal Urral 37" x 62"
Guillaume Leunens occupies a unique position in the world of painting. In the first place, the parents of this Belgian painter were workers and he himself was a worker in a foundry. He kept of his origins and of his time as a factory worker the fundamental qualities of a conscientious and skilled worker respecting the material he is working with: colors or metal. His attitude towards reality is that of a person knowing the inestimable price of everything. His intention is to express it in its complexity, but not without a certain creative inspiration that establishes it firmly and enlarges it until it becomes a universe of unique and capturing beauty.
In the second place, the autodidact Guillaume Leunens has developed, through his own experiments, an outstanding technique: more thanks to the expertise of the artisan than to that of the artist who is full of the teachings of whatever art school. His paintings, which we will not see at the exhibition, and his metals are the results of influences - Breughel, van Gogh and Permeke - under which he came during his visits to museums and during his technological apprenticeship as an adolescent. This blend of the experienced and the acquired has created a synthesis of techniques, which results in the use of aluminum in form of large sheets stretched on a frame. They will not fail to immediately surprise the visitor. However, the eyes finally enter the harmonious play of modulations ranging from black over a diversity of metallic gray shades to silver. This voluntary deprivation, which does not lack an analogy with that of contemporary music, is of a certain pathetic greatness in spite of the material used: aluminum.
In this choice lies yet another reason for Guillaume Leunens originality: having expressed, in an admirable way, through "metal"..., the two fundamental notions of the art of painting: space and movement. This he achieves through a series of bumps and hollows with stripes in all directions across them, which captivate the light and reproduce it in different shades, whose obscure shimmer creates all kinds of variations emphasizing the relief and making it palpable and mobile. The dominant impression is that of a meteoric universe which already reflects the world sensed in advance.
Guillaume Leunens has repeatedly displayed his works in Paris, Tunis, Spain... and, as for example last month, in Brussels.
Reggui, Orléans, La république du Centre, March 15, 1968.