Leon Wuidmar:The Vocabulary of Architecture?

I'd never heard of Leon Wuidar but the retrospective of the octogenarian Belgian artist at White Cube, Mason's Yard was free so I thought I'd go and have a look. It didn't detain me for particularly long.

Charpentes (1965)

 

That's not because I didn't like his art so much as his art is something that doesn't really take very long to look at. The exhibition traces Wuidar's career from the early sixties up to the middle of the eighties and is intended to show how Wuidar's art is influenced by the "vocabulary of architecture" and the ruined buildings of post-war Belgium.

 

Wuidar was friends with one of Belgium's leading architects of the era, Charles Vandenhove - who made buildings in Brussels, Liege, as well as The Hague and Paris, and both men considered a house to be, quite simply, an "assembly of geometric shapes". You can see that in early Wuidar paintings like Charpentes which is, of course, an assembly of geometric shapes itself. A reasonably aesthetically pleasing one. But then so is most of Wuidar's art.

 

Ecrans, 1 septembre 1973 (1973)

18 novembre 82 (1982)

Composition au trait interrompu, 21 juillet 79 (1979)

Very little of it truly excites though. From the work that seems to riff on that of hard-edge painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman to more playful pieces, like Victoire and Composition avec de chevrons, that almost look like boardgames. Victoire, specifically, reminds me of backgammon.

A game I can't even play. Wuidar himself has spoken of finding inspiration from Paul 'taking a line for a walk' Klee and the small, almost modest, paintings of Giorgio Morandi as well as the cartouches on the tombs of pharoahs and the pamphlet you pick up at the desk of the gallery contains such alphabet soup as "the dynamic interplay of form between curved and rectilinear lines and shapes". Who writes this stuff? Can I do it? I need a job.

Un morceau de musique (1962)

Victoire (1965)

Composition avec des chevrons (1968)

Grand Air, 21 avril 65; fevrier 1968 (1965-68)

Figure derisoire (1966)

To be fair, some of them have a charm. I particularly liked the spidery Figure derisoire and the jellyish Paysage Rocheux. Elsewhere I was reminded of Fernand Leger which is no short praise but, ultimately - and despite being pleased to finally learn a little about Leon Wuidar and his art, I came away understanding why I'd probably never heard of him before.

Paysage Rocheux, 17 juillet 72 (1972)

A perte de vue, mai 1970 (1970)

Places, 22 octobre 73 (1973)