BRUSSELS.- Rodolphe Janssen is exhibiting the first solo of Léon Wuidar exclusively focusing on works on paper. Opened on Thursday, 26 October 2023 at Livourne 32, VIEUX JEUX… dessins/tekeningen/drawings presents a selection of works on paper to continue the dialogue initiated at Art On Paper Brussels earlier in October.

Léon Wuidar and the practice of drawing: Drawing is an integral part of Léon Wuidar’s artistic practice, but one rarely introduced to the public. Having first studied technical drawing at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Liège, he later became a professor, teaching drawing and graphic arts at the same institution for forty years.

Drawing is constitutive to Léon Wuidar’s daily routine and takes a variety of forms: in the morning, he meticulously colours sketches in his preparatory notebooks, laying the foundations for the paintings that follow; he designs covers for his friends’ journals or magazines; and he also possesses a whole inventory of paper objects such as his pedestal fans. Léon Wuidar is passionate about books and writing. He sometimes recovers their bindings and assembles them into collages. Like visual studies of language, some of his works play with words, occasionally revealing a concealed meaning while establishing links between the shape or appearance of one specific word, its sense and its phonetics. Eventually, the aesthetics of these works reveal compositions of the same precision as his paintings, though with somehow generally more subdued tonalities.

Léon Wuidar

(b. 1938 in Liège, Belgium. Lives and works in Liège, Belgium)

Regularly exhibited for 60 years in Belgium and Europe, and present in many public collections in Belgium, Léon Wuidar is one of the few Belgian artists who has, throughout his life, persevered in the path of constructive or concrete abstraction. At the dawn of his 80 years, he finally began to receive the recognition he deserved and was rediscovered by a new generation of international collectors and artists.

Léon Wuidar often quotes as sources of inspiration both his childhood in Liége during and just after the war, as well as architecture and his friendship with the architect Charles Vandenhove. With Charles Vandenhove, he collaborated on numerous in situ projects, including the Sart Tilman Hospital in Liège in the early 1970s (with amongst others Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, and Sol LeWitt). Vandenhove will also help him design his house and studio, on the heights of Esneux. A perfect example of the brutalist and functionalist architecture of Vandenhove, Wuidar lives and works there always surrounded by nature, his collection and his books.

Wuidar’s work is based on precision, discipline and humor; mixing shapes and colors to create harmonious, precise and meticulously balanced compositions. His paintings juxtapose squares, rectangles, polygons, and curves often surrounded by a double border of color and always finished by a simple wooden frame.

Recent solo exhibitions include : Bonnison Art Center, Rognes, France; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, UK, MAC’s, Grand- Hornu, Belgium; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland; Vandenhove Centrum voor Architectuur en Kunst, Gent, Belgium; White Cube, London, UK; rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium; Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Brussels, Belgium; L’Espace du Dedans, Lille; France and Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung, Bonn, Germany.

Wuidar’s work is held in international public collections including Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Bibliothèque Albertine, Brussels, Belgium; Fernmeldetechnisches Zentralamt, Darmstadt, Germany; Dorstener Maschinenfabrik, Dorsten, Germany; Fondation IDAC, Mondriaanhuis, Amersfoort, The Netherlands; Musée d’Art Wallon, Liège, Belgium; Cabinet des Estampes, Liège, Belgium; Musée en plein air du Sart Tilman, Liège, Belgium; Centre de la Gravure et de l’image imprimée, La Louvière, Belgium; Fondation Meeus, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Musée de Mariemont, Morlanwelz, Belgium; and Musée des Beaux- Arts, Verviers, Belgium; Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France; FRAC Normandie, Caen, France.

Rodolphe Janssen
Léon Wuidar: VIEUX JEUX… dessins/tekeningen/drawings
October 26th, 2023 - December 16th, 2023