Léon Wuidar is a strange and captivating painter, famous in his native Belgium yet still barely known here. His art is generally described as a form of geometric abstraction, but the description seems entirely inadequate. His paintings are slow, meticulous, exquisitely conceived in their balance of shapes and colours against the rectangle of each canvas, but they all carry a depth of memory and emotion, and often a quizzical humour that turns them into something closer to stories.
Born in Liège in 1938, Wuidar worked for many years as a professor of drawing before he allowed himself to paint full-time from the age of 60. His earliest works seem to carry childhood recollections of the second world war.
