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.
A stunning painting called Efflorescence, from 1964, shows what appear to be harvest fields by moonlight: a series of pale grey stems in a radiant gloaming. It only occurred to me, looking closely at the very fine striations of his brushmarks, that the light might be artificial and perhaps even sinister, something closer to the magnesium flash of an explosion.
Victoire, from the following year, is an array of squares and triangles in ethereal greys, dotted here and there with a darker crescent or disc. There are hints of architecture – a tiny arcade, the sense of a city square from above – so that the pale triangles seem evocative of searchlights. But the painting irresistibly reads as a face with a downturned moustache-cum-smile as well, an ambiguity that gives it the air of tragicomic satire.
The small painting next to it evokes a triangular array of medals, except that the discs are all in ash-greys and browns, as if these posthumous tokens of courage were themselves deceased. Below them, however, is a single dot that turns the whole image into a subtle exclamation mark.
Wuidar works with painstaking care on inexpensive canvases, the weave of which sometimes shows through. He makes his own simple wooden frames. There are overtones of 1920s Belgian surrealism, of Max Ernst and Magritte. The earliest painting at the White Cube, from 1962, conflates hints of organ pipes, theatre boxes and orchestra stalls all in one exquisitely condensed sheaf of uprights and horizontals in sepia, chestnut and burnt umber. Un morceau de musique is the piquant title of this little low-toned song.
In the mid 60s, Wuidar switched to a painting style “free of any realism”, as he put it, “but without denying myself the occasional allusion to the visible world”. This is humorous understatement. For it is the back and forth between abstraction and figuration that defines his whole output. A small painting called Vanité sets up a concatenation of geometric forms in silver-blue and grey that hints at the mirror reflections on a dressing table, as well as the shadows all around it in a bedroom. Les images quotidiennes, 24 Sept 69 evokes easels and canvases, windows and curtains, studio light and streetlight, playing with the heavy black outlines you might see later in a Patrick Caulfield. Everything about the composition, and the colours – neutral to black with a triangle of sharp cobalt – stands outside time, so that it might be Liège in 1969 or right here and now today.
In Belgium, Wuidar has long been associated with the brutalist architecture of his native city, and in particular the work of his longtime friend, the leading Belgian architect Charles Vandenhove. He made works for Vandenhove’s university hospital in Liège, along with Daniel Buren and Sol LeWitt. Wuidar has lived for decades in a house designed by Vandenhove, and there is no question that an architectural vein runs through his work.
A secret passage, a bunker, a side view into a dead end, the place in a house where a person might hide: there are visible, if extremely oblique allusions to all in this show. Yet you could never place them, so to speak, in any actual building or location. They are more like clues, or maps, or something akin to blueprints for dreams of places in Wuidar’s head.
The most recent works here, from the 80s, do away with titles altogether in favour of dates. Perhaps they function as a kind of visual diary for the artist. These paintings are astringently geometric, with their hard-edged panels of acid colour. The metaphorical connections with our world appear somewhat lost.
But even with a purely rectilinear composition, Wuidar can play a delicate game with lines and outlines, playing them off against colour and shape. In one long, narrow canvas he varies the width of a line against the volume of colour it encloses to make the eye perceive seams of bright gold out of nothing more than hues of green and pink. A line of light, a triangle of salmon, a couple of chevrons of darker pinks and greens, and you start to see something like the back of a silk tie, with its two-tone origami. The shape of the painting becomes pleasingly significant. And sure enough, the title is Fold.
