Its true value

Metal and fire, the material and element he got to know during his first practical job experiences, characterize the originality of Leunens' work. It would have been a logical consequence that the choice of that material and formative element make him participate in the new efforts made by the iron sculptors. However, Leunens did not take this direction, because when he started his experiments, he was already a painter. And when he had come to the point of wishing to abandon the traditional means of painting, which he found outdated for himself, he nevertheless always respected the pictorial means of expression and developed new techniques which, in his view, had to correspond better to the style of the modern world and allowed him to adapt more precisely the dimensional suggestions of this works to the extraordinary expansion of the spatial field at a time when the conquest of the cosmos was taking place.
 So we see, in his recent works, how those small relief elements, ... emphasizing his metal sheets, which are animated and almost dematerialized by trails of shadow and light, act in a purely visual manner in order to establish space relations and provide strong anchorage points to the fervor of the mind seeking supra terrestrial evasion.
 His conviction and inspiration have certainly not changed since he created his first works of art. However, one can easily see that, thanks to new working methods, he has succeeded in sensitizing these relief structures to a greater extent and, above all, in materializing in a certain way the very mobility and rapidity of the trajectory of these projections, thus emphasizing the active spatiality of his surfaces.
 We can only hope that Leunens will soon be given the occasion of creating large murals in which his highly personal art style could demonstrate its real value.

R.V. Gindertael Paris
Translated from French