Like many artists nowadays, Guillaume Leunens is preoccupied with the issues of space and movement. However, he gave a new interpretation to the plastic expression of these two factors. The notion of space has been sensitized and spiritualized through a play of modulations, ranging from black over a diversity of metallic gray shades to silver.

This tonality covers the surface of the painting and wraps, at times, the areas containing slight relief, which appear like materials integrated in the depth of this space. Combined with the modulations of color, they have the effect of revealing the three-dimensional appearance of the subject and giving, in a certain way, depth and volume to the space.

In this environment bodies are moving, such as meteors falling into pieces under the effect of speed and underlining their trajectory with a luminous slipstream; bodies that are indefinable but at the same time materialized by a greatly accentuated relief.

Here we have a method of painting whose deprivation and apparent simplicity emphasize the evocative power. At a time that is characterized by the cosmos and crazy speeds in space, this method suggests through the very absence of relations with anything terrestrial (be it only the color) a supra terrestrial universe. One could almost say that Guillaume Leunens' art gives such an impression of truth and objectivity that it represents no longer abstraction but rather anticipatory realism.

André Marc, Brussels, La Lanterne, November 7, 1964.
Translated from French