Leen Voet at M

Leen Voet's work could be described as colourful paintings that touch on fundamental patterns, relationships and traditions in art and society. From 7 April, you can visit her very first retrospective at M. An absolute eye-opener.

A love-hate relationship with painting

Leen Voet

In the first room, you will see 'Je fais ce que je veux': a series of paintings of which the Flemish Community in 2012 purchased three duos and which M has had on long-term loan ever since. There is a special story behind them.

Leen Voet: "The work starts from an excerpt from 'Rendez-vous avec...', a French TV programme from the 1960s. In it, Jacqueline Joubert, France's first female TV presenter, hosted a well-known guest every week. In the episode I use, it was Bourvil, a singer, comedian and actor who was very popular at the time. He sings a playful song about marriage, 'Je fais ce que tu veux'. There are six doors in a semicircle as part of the studio décor. In the middle, Jacqueline Joubert, who briefly takes on an acting role here, is sitting in a chair. Apart from the wonderfully funny performance, I was triggered by the many doors, and how Bourvil activates them. He knocks on every door, playfully suggesting that the marriage he sings about might not be entirely monogamous. The doors thus become a third character, alongside Jacqueline Joubert and Bourvil. Their role is reversed, from passive to active."

"I copied the subdivision of the six doors on as many canvases. I made them the same height as Bourvil himself - 1.72 metres. The result is reminiscent of abstract paintings yet without being immediately familiar. On the back, pink paint shows the lyrics of a stanza from the song, which simultaneously serves as the title of the work."

"I then created a painting for each of the six doors with a silhouette of a male figure – Bourvil – or a female figure – Jacqueline Joubert, a reference to the binary logic of a marriage. That is how I created six duos in which there is a shift from individual to object and from active to passive. Three of these duos have previously been shown at Baronian gallery in Brussels, but the full series will be exhibited for the first time at M."

"Bourvil's song is called 'Je fais ce que tu veux', but I have turned that into 'Je fais ce que je veux'. A quick nod to what is called artistic freedom."

Whatever-colours

'Je fais ce que je veux' is a great example of the way you work. You start from something concrete, at times even anecdotal, but you transform it into something completely new that is your own work. The result usually exists somewhere between figurative and abstract.
"The Bert Vandael series is another example of this. Bert Vandael was one of our teachers in the secondary art school in Turnhout, where I went to school. Every week, he told us to paint a landscape through observation in watercolour – a classic educational exercise. After a while, the routine started to bore me and I began to allow myself variants. For example, a green village scene became a factory with smoking chimneys painted from a photograph."

"In 2016, I started reinterpreting that series of watercolours from the 1980s in oil. It is a lengthy process, that I do alongside other work. For the Bert Vandael series, I decided in advance to elaborate the entire series using geometricised line drawings. I then fill these using different colours and then add grids and lines over them in contrasting colours. It is a search for figuration and systematics, for visual codes and the anti-pictorial.

Leen Voet, ‘#BVD #43’, 2017 © Leen Voet en Baronian, photo: Kristien Daem

You often use strikingly bright, tightly delineated, shadowless areas of colour. How do you choose your colours?
"That is not the same for every series. The use of colour is decided based on the series. For example, for the Bert Vandael series, I had decided not to consider the aesthetic, the sensible or the logical. I call it whatever-colours. The grids I paint over them correct the balance somewhat but also add a graphical tension through their dynamism that relates to the colour."

"For the new series 'Bernard, Paul & Constant', which I made for the exhibition at M, I deliberately deploy a limited colour palette of red, yellow and blue which I complemented with black and grey. The primary colours refer to De Stijl, and by extension to modernism. I am interested in how a painting can behave, and how you as a viewer build an affective bond with it based on prior knowledge and experiences. Also in how abstraction relates to figuration."

You work a lot in sequences. Why is this so important to you?
"Precisely because of that tension between the individual image and the series. Each work has its own identity, but at the same time refers to the other works in the series. Those two aspects are equally important to me."

Works from the 'Alda & Armand' series will also be on display at M. Those are the first names of your parents.
"'Alda & Armand' is a series of 12 paintings. They are based on four flowered kitchen towels, which my parents were given as a gift at a food fair in the 70s or 80s. Those gifted towels interested me because they evoked fond memories of my childhood, but my father would only give them to me on condition that I make paintings out of them. I painted three versions of each towel. One, a fairly faithful copy, one a more geometric version and one a bolder version."

Leen Voet, exhibition view ‘Alda & Armand’, Baronian, Brussel, 2019 © Leen Voet and Baronian, photo: Isabelle Arthuis

Hopeless case

The Saint-Rita series, a series of colourful paintings for which you are set off from modernist church interiors, will also be on show at M.
"St Rita is the patron saint of hopeless cases. The series is named after Léon Stynen and Paul De Meyer's magnificent 1960s church in Harelbeke. I was fascinated by the interior, by the 'body' of the church and the small objects you often find in churches like candelabras, lecterns, crucifixes.... They sit at the intersection of utilitarian objects and art. There are details from those objects in the paintings."

"The canvases from the Saint Rita series are not mounted. Instead, they are shown on five different wooden structures that reference easels, standing freely in the space. The installation plays with a conflict in spatiality. Between, on the one hand, the two-dimensionality of the depicted churches and, on the other, the spatial arrangement of the painted surface. In the space in between, a new 'body' is in a way created."

"I like paintings as material objects, their physical presence. At the same time, I feel a distaste for the slow, artisanal, almost old-fashioned nature of the process of making them. I explore the programmatic, the schematic, the serial, and at the same time the limited space left for the affective within that framework. That tension, that friction fascinates me, and at the same time, it bothers me sometimes. I have a love-hate relationship with painting.

Leen Voet, exhibition view ‘Sint-Rita’ in ‘Un Scene III’, Wiels, Brussel, 2015 © Leen Voet

Inspiration from M

You have also created a number of new works especially for the exhibition. For that, you took inspiration in M's collection.
"I had long been interested in the images artists make of their own workshops and those of others. I started searching M's collection with the help of the erfgoedplus.be digital collection database. I found six 19th- and 20th-century paintings that interested me. I then had a look at them at M's depot, and I kept three. All three depict a workshop in a very detailed way, with great attention to spatiality. The three works interested me because within them, the focus shifts from the depiction of a space to a portrayal of the artist themselves, without actually depicting them. It is this identification of the artist with the space of their workshop that I find remarkable."

"I then proceeded as with previous series. Before I started painting, I made digital schematic line drawings following the compositions of the originals. You can still recognise the 19th- and 20th-century paintings, but the image has been reduced to a minimum. A great deal of visual information has been omitted, leaving only the diagram of the original. As with 'The model' by 19th-century genre painter Paul Haesaert, on which he depicts an artist while portraying a female model. On the floor, there is a crumpled-up piece of textile, a painter's rag, but it might also be her panties. Sitting next to the model is an elderly woman, perhaps her mother. You sense that she is there to watch over the chastity. Those details, the suggestive panties and the worried mother, tell you that society at the time was still very sexist. That's why I left them out. In the background, Haesaert shows a canvas on an easel - a painting-in-the-painting, a so-called mise-en-abîme. That, I did keep the outline of."

"The originals from M's collection are much smaller than my recreations. But I present a monochrome canvas of the same dimensions as the original alongside each new work. The titles of my works also refer to the originals, although they are not shown themselves."

Atelier Leen Voet — © Eva Beeusaert for M Leuven

Self-portrait in school uniform

You also for the first time did self-portraits for the exhibition at M.
"Yes, that is something new for me. I started from a self-portrait I painted when I was 17, again as a school assignment in art college. I painted the original using the grisailles technique as used in the Flemish Primitives. It shows me in my school uniform, but appears not to be finished completely."

You touched on it already, how your work also ask questions about gender relations in art and society in general.
"My work is never directly about the male-female relationships, but male role models are definitely present in it. For example, male names often recur in the titles: 'Bernard, Paul & Constant', Bert Vandael, the Felix series around Felix De Boeck.... They represent the church, the family, the teacher-pupil relationship, artistry..."

Interesting!

This will be your very first retrospective. What do you expect?
"For the first time, I am going to bring different series together. I am curious to see how visitors will experience it. Hopefully, they will gain more insight into my work."

"The exhibition also includes the first retrospective publication of my oeuvre, including room views of the exhibition and the new works. It's great to make an exhibition that preserves something of it afterwards."