Guy Leclercq: Silence Opaque

Galerie Dutko is pleased to present Silence Opaque, Guy Leclercq’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. On this occasion, we will present 18 works created over the last two years, presented for the first time in France. 

Since the early 1980s, Guy Leclercq, born in Opbrakel (Belgium) in 1940, has opted for the language of geometry as a pictorial vector of expression. A refined geometry, driven by a strikingly mastered technique. To virtuoso technical demonstration, the painter chooses the elegance of subtlety, but the gesture is of an unflinching technicality. 

The canvas, prepared according to ancient techniques, is coated with an undercoat of casein. The colors emerge from rare pigments, and if his palette seems restricted to black, brown, gray and white, thousands of shades compose his works. Vine black, triple black, carbon black, Roman black, mummy black, etc. The painter goes so far as to rework the pictorial layer by scraping, rubbing, creating textures of great richness, so that it emerges as an impression of collage which is not without evoking certain works of Braque or Picasso.

His geometric vocabulary is never flat nor simplistic. The layers are superimposed, intersect and overlap, merging into a variety of striking relief-like effects; almost like bas relief accentuated by the central position of the geometrical “structures” in the compositions, standing out from the canvas by their volumetry. 

His works reveal themselves only to the attentive eyes and patient minds, and the mysteries of their compositions require time. A time of listening – one could say – necessary, to perceive all the demands, all the nuances and all the suggestions. 

There is always something to discover in Guy Leclercq’s painting. Here an ethereal shadow all in halftone, there a slight gradation in the angle of a curve, an imperceptible change of texture, etc. Abstraction allows him to give form to subtlety and to paint silence. An opaque silence, but a sonorous one with rigorous and delicate melodies.