«Léon Wuidar,
une peinture à géométrie variable»

For the 2023 summer season, the Bonisson Art Center, located in Rognes near Aix en Provence, has decided to pay tribute to Léon Wuidar, the first solo exhibition devoted to him in France. The exhibition is curated by Marjolaine Lévy, with the support of Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels).

In the exhibition, Wuidar’s work dialogues with the abstractions of his Belgian compatriots, Jo Delahaut and Marthe Wéry, as well as with the works of Geneviève Claisse, Auguste Herbin and Aurélie Nemours, whom Wuidar has always regarded with attention. Finally, the committed narrative abstraction of Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti offers a contemporary counterpoint to the parallel history of abstraction embodied in Wuidar’s work, a painting of variable geometry.

Exhibition curated by Marjolaine Lévy and supported by Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels).
With the kind participation of: Catherine Bollini – Marseille, CNAP (EAC deposit – Donation Albers-Honegger – Mouans-Sartoux), Fondation Marthe Wery – Belgium, galerie Crèvecœur – Paris, galerie A&R Fleury – Paris, galerie Lahumière – Paris, galerie Zlotowski – Paris.

The exhibition is open to the public during opening hours, Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm.
Guided tours of the exhibition are available on Saturdays and Sundays at 4pm, by prior arrangement.

The exhibition “Léon Wuidar, a painting of variable geometry” presents the Belgian painter’s pictorial work for the first time in France. Born in Liège in 1938, Léon Wuidar has been producing seemingly geometric abstractions since the early 1960s, painting that is “free from realism, but without depriving itself of the occasional allusion to the visible world”, as the artist puts it, not without a sense of humor. In his pictorial inventory, childhood memories cohabit: the reflections of the enameled tiles in his mother’s kitchen; the simple shapes, circles and squares, rattling in his baby’s rattle; the geometrically patterned wallpaper covering his tailor father’s fabric store; the slate roofs of Liège; and his first artistic inclinations. He discovered the work of Ben Nicholson in the Belgian magazine Choix at the age of 14, then the surrealism of René Magritte and Max Ernst, and the works of Alberto Magnelli, Hans Arp and Hans Hartung, presented in exhibitions organized by APIAW (Association pour le Progrès, Intellectuel et Artistique en Wallonie). The postmodernist lines of the architecture of his friend Charles Vandenhove are also part of his formal memory. From this vast repertoire of forms and memories, Wuidar draws the motifs for his singular “abstractions”, compositions in which line and color subtly balance each other. It all begins with a notebook in which the artist draws dozens of small geometries in pencil on an almost daily basis, constrained by a frame, which he then fills with color. From these hundreds of drawings, one is chosen by Wuidar to exist on a larger scale, in oil on linen canvas. This abstract painting “from next door”, which for too long has eluded the official history of art, reveals its full complexity here.
Text: Marjolaine Lévy

Artists featured in the exhibition « Léon Wuidar , une peinture à géométrie variable » :
Geneviève Claisse (born in 1923 in Vannes – 2011)
Jo Delahaut (born in Voteem, Belgium – 1992)
Auguste Herbin (born in 1892 in Quiévy, France – 1960)
Ad Minoliti (born in 1980 in Argentina)
Aurélie Nemours (born in 1910 in Paris – 2005)
Marthe Wéry (born in 1930 in Eterbeek, Belgium – 2005)
Léon Wuidar (born in 1938 in Belgium)