Léon Wuidar

Often citing childhood memories of a post-war Belgium in ruins as a key influence, as well as his friendship with the late architect Charles Vandenhove, Wuidar’s painting is deeply rooted in the vocabulary of architecture. Wuidar met Vandenhove in the 1960s, and still lives and works in the Brutalist house and studio in Esneux, near Liège, which the architect designed. ‘A house is an assembly of geometric shapes, so Vandenhove and I have a common vocabulary,’ the artist has said.

Wuidar’s early paintings from the 1960s reflect his long-standing interest in the work of Paul Klee, and the cubist-surrealist posters of Adolphe Mouron Cassandre. Wuidar’s palette during this period was predominantly neutral, employing earthy tones and bearing basic representational motifs intended to be evocative and associative rather than emblematic. The composition of Comme un fruit étrange dans la bouche (1967), for example, revolves around what the artist has identified as ‘the Pharaoh’s cartouche’, a rectangle with rounded ends. Paintings such as this demonstrate the artist’s systematic and suggestive use of shapes, and a love of the ‘naivety’ that he has found in ancient Egyptian art. Elsewhere, recognisable details – a face, an eye or a spider – have been made distinct, executed with a clarity and precision that at once accentuates the absurdity of their presence and, in the case of Composition avec des chevrons (1968) and Arlequin à l’oeil, 21 mai 66 (1966), their co-existence with a greater pattern or plane.