"I work with the freedom of someone who listens to what the paper wants to become."
Five years of dialogue between paper and precision. Five years of partnership between artist
and gallery. With 'Extra Muros', Forwart Gallery celebrates its five-year collaboration with
Guy Leclef. At the end of March, Leclef steps beyond the gallery walls for a solo exhibition in
Cabuy, where his oeuvre unfolds, literally and figuratively, outside all boundaries.
Some artists paint with pigment, others sculpt in clay or chisel stone. Guy Leclef chose a
humble, almost careless material: paper. What for many is merely a carrier of words and
images, a disposable product that tears, decays or burns after use, became for him an
alphabet. His alphabet.
In his hands, paper finds a second breath, becomes a skin in which time, memory and
emotion gather. Somewhere between collage and sculpture, between architecture and
poetry, he builds an oeuvre that renders the fragility of existence tangible. What remains
after the fleeting nature of ink and print is transformed in his studio into a monument to the
transient.
Paper: a child folds it into a paper plane, a writer fills it with words, a reader lets themselves
be carried away in fantasy. It is a material so commonplace that we scarcely pause to
consider it. And yet within that ordinariness lies a source of inexhaustible beauty.
Leclef discovers in the grain, the frayed edges and the torn margins an aesthetic that has
nothing to do with the utilitarian. He treats paper as though it were marble: carefully cut,
glued, folded, layered. It demands discipline and patience. No swift gestures, but a slow
devotion in which thousands of strips and fragments converge into a skin that breathes.
His work connects surprisingly with the tradition of Arte Povera, the movement that in the
sixties and seventies sought the sublime in the banal. Old magazines, glossy relics of a
world full of glamour and consumption, are dissected, glued and assembled with natural
resins and adhesives. Each sheet is dried to just before the threshold of decay, then cut and
rebuilt into patterns that evoke geological cross-sections or architectural models. From a
distance, the compositions appear painted; up close, they reveal their true nature: paper that
transcends itself. In Leclef's studio, even the most ephemeral printed matter finds a second
breath, a new destination.
Auwegemvaart 70, 2800 Mechelen
