GUILLAUME LEUNENS

CIMAISES: Guillaume Leunens

  Between "action painting" where the spontaneous gesture, theoretically, as the only guide,  the subconscious  impulses and the''geometrisme'' calculated where the forms, the lines and the colors respond to an intentional organization, and a controlled surface of the panel, the  non-figurative art covers a wide universe, whose center remains with evidence and even with instance, the man.

 Not a absolute being, a kind of archetype, nor even the reassuring image of the "mens sana in corpore sano", but a man made of concern and hope, convinced that the immediate appearances are not limits entrenched and that beyond the objectivity of the reason, the logic opens another universe, which is also his own.
    A part of the non-figurative art wanted to explore these areas still unclear and create a language that can become as representative as that of the forms borrowed to reality

     The works of Guillaume Leunens offer, in this subject, a beautiful example of the balance between what the poet feels and what the painter knows, between what the artist designs as an artist and what he expresses of indefinable and mysterious in his paintings.   

These works make you  think of a form of neo-expressionism, whom the lyricism, instead of developing into tumultuous waves, has been channelled in an architecture fairly strict. The construction is based on an ensemble of surfaces quadrangular, elongated in the sense of the verticality and which generates a rate of lines and forms. By his own painting, Guillaume Leunens envelope this construction and takes away too much geometrical rigor by integrating it into modulations of colors, in degraded light to dark, in changing certain forms of  precision lines into imprecision. Some edges of this architecture have a slight relief, previously obtained, at the time of gluing on rigid panel. The finished paintings, they have the effect of catching the light and to highlight certain lines by a natural sparkle, according to their exposition to the light. 

The light moreover, plays an essential role in the works of Leunens, a light which has little relationship with that of the impressionists, which takes rather the appearance of a clarity  "Rembranesque",which without that we can, strictly speaking, qualify it to clear-obscure. Rather, it is a shadow wrap, rift here and there by sharp light . In fact, this light, which is also color, creates a climate, violence sometimes, as in “''Nero'', or of mystery, as in the "Isis". It gives through its modulations, by its dominant tone , an atmosphere more psychological then physical, to those strange architectures, temples and cathedrals, outside time and space.


André Marc, Brussels, La Lanterne, May 6-7 1961.
Translated from French


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