Luc Peire
LUC PEIRE
THE RIGHT LINES
Luc Peire’s “Environment” is a room with a floor and ceiling made of mirrors. All four walls are marked with the distinctive vertical lines that characterise the artist’s later work. Standing inside the room you can see the lines – and yourself – repeated infinitely above your head and beneath your feet. It is an unnerving yet exhilarating experience.
“Environment” was the final piece in Space, the Peire retrospective at FelixArt in Drogenbos, just outside Brussels. Knowing that, there is considerable temptation to rush past the other work and begin at the end. But it pays to take things gradually and see just how Peire arrived at this total expression of his artistic philosophy.
Peire was born in Bruges in 1916, where he also began his education in art. He went on to study in Ghent and Antwerp, developing in the tradition of Flemish expressionists such as Constant Permeke and Gustave Van de Woestyne, both of whom he knew.
After the Second World War he became part of the broadly modernist Jeune Peinture Belge movement, but also went in search of his own style. A trip to Italy was decisive, according to exhibition co-curator Marc Peire.
“He visited all the sites and monuments of the Renaissance, saw Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and that was perhaps an affirmation of his own vision and concept of art.”
THEMATIC SHIFT
Marc is Luc’s nephew, and the curator and archivist of the Jenny and Luc Peire Foundation in Knokke, on the Flemish coast, which looks after the artist’s collection.
Luc continued to travel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, taking inspiration from the light and colours in southern Europe and on the Canary Islands. But it was a visit to the Belgian Congo in 1952-53 that produced a definitive thematic shift. Confronted with a population in which he saw humanity en masse rather than as individuals, he started to represent the human form in more general terms.
Luc Peire was not a symmetric or a geometric painter, but a painter of balance
- MARC PEIRE
“He said this was the moment when he moved from the anecdotic man to the spiritual man, to the human being,” says Marc. “And that was the beginning of his abstraction.”
Through the 1950s these stylised figures became straight lines, a representation of humanity in an idealised space that might be a room, an artist’s studio or a stage. Several paintings from this period also feature curtains, a further suggestion of the theatre but also a way of creating depth though apparent undulations of fabric within the flat surface of the painting.
While these and later paintings seem purely abstract, the names are still suggestive: “Godot”, “Brasilia”, “Lucca”, “Venice”, “Atlantic”. “Each painting had a connection with something he had experienced or read,” Marc explains. “It’s not a rigid abstraction; there is always something personal.”
Usually Luc kept these inspirations to himself, only once explaining to a critic the detailed story behind a painting. But one can see connections, for instance in a series of “Elegies” that all deploy blues and blacks for mourning, or a series named after French cathedrals which share a mood of sombre greyness.
EXTRAORDINARY CITY
From the mid-1950s Luc also started to experiment with new techniques, in particular coating Formica and then Plexiglas with black paint that could then be scraped away to create lines of black and white, or black and light. The effect is very fine and nuanced, appearing to purify the abstraction.
Even so, there is something instinctive about the arrangements of lines. “Luc Peire was not a symmetric or a geometric painter, but a painter of balance,” his nephew says.
One way he used this technique was to produce a series of square towers of varying heights, whose lined sides are lit from inside, reproducing his visual theme in three dimensions. He made prototypes of these “Lumino Tours” in groups of four in the 1970s, then several sets in 1980.
This was the moment when he moved from the anecdotic man to the spiritual man, to the human being
- MARC PEIRE
“When these multiples were made, all 25 were put together, making an extraordinary city,” Marc recalls. Afterwards they were sold and dispersed, but FelixArt has collected 17 towers from different collections and grouped them together. A powerful light shines through them on to a white wall. Peire: “With the reflections and shadows, one can imagine the effect.”
The artist’s urge to see his ideas realised in three dimensions and extended into the living, working environment also resulted in a handful of monumental projects. In the exhibition these are presented through photographs, models and documents. Some can still be seen in real life, such as the tower “Teken” on the Gasthuisberg campus of Leuven’s University Hospital, or the interior of Roodebeek metro station in Brussels.
Others have disappeared, such as a large amphitheatre in a housing project in Marne-la-Vallée, France, where Peire’s patterns of lines on the floor of the square mirrored the verticals of the surrounding tower blocks. The pattern has now either been removed or covered over.
But “Environment” is the culmination of this line of thought, a way for Luc to place the spectator inside his art. Built in 1967 for an exhibition in France, it was subsequently bought by the Belgian state and then passed on to the Flemish community. It usually resides at the Foundation, but has exceptionally been moved to FelixArt for the next couple of months.
TOWARDS THE INFINITE
From the late 1950s, Peire split his time between France and Belgium, usually giving up Paris in the heat of summer for the cool of the Flemish coast. After his death in 1994, the Foundation was set up to look after his collection and archive, and also took charge of his villa and studio in Knokke.
