Des géométries instables

Two person exhibition curated by Marjolaine Lévy

Paris-born, Los Angeles-based painter and visual artist Brooklin A. Soumahoro has a profound intuition for color and line. His work begins with humble painted underlayers, evolving through extraordinary technical precision and personal discipline. Soumahoro seamlessly fuses precise geometric patterns with vibrant, energetic color fields, creating layered, transportive surfaces that act as visual thresholds. Rooted in his multicultural upbringing and diverse interests, Soumahoro’s creative process draws inspiration from unexpected and eclectic sources. Music, sound, and ideas of sonic frequency resonate as strongly in his imagination as traditions of patterning, global art histories, and broader cultural touchstones. Synthesizing these influences through rigorous color theory research and meticulous formal approaches, Soumahoro creates images that are contemplative and portal-like, inviting viewers to journey beyond the surface.

Brooklin A. Soumahoro (b. 1990, Paris, France) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo and group exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York City; rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium; Barbati Gallery, Venice, Italy; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, USA; The Pit, Los Angeles, USA; and Massimo De Carlo V-Space.

Léon Wuidar is one of the few Belgian artists who has, throughout his life, persevered in the path of constructive or concrete abstraction. Wuidar’s work is based on precision, discipline and humor; mixing shapes and colors to create harmonious, precise and meticulously balanced compositions. His paintings juxtapose squares, rectangles, polygons, and curves often surrounded by a double border of color and always finished by a simple wooden frame.

Wuidar regularly exhibited for 60 years in Belgium and Europe, notably at Bonnison Art Center (Rognes, France), MAC’s Grand Hornu (Grand Hornu, Belgium), Haus Konstruktiv (Zürich, Switzerland) and Musée Félicien Rops (Namur, Belgium) and is present in many public collections, such as The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium and Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. He is also represented by White Cube (London, Hong Kong & New York).

Léon Wuidar is born in 1938 in Liège, Belgium and based in Liège, Belgium.

About the exhibition

“Des géométries variables” presents an unexpected encounter between two painters, LéonWuidar and Brooklin A. Soumahoro, who at first glance seem to have little in common. They differ in artistic lineage, generation, and geography. Wuidar was born in 1938 in Liège, where he still lives, and since the late 1960s has produced singular paintings, works that inherit geometric abstraction yet never fully renounce figuration or references to the world around us.

Soumahoro, on the other hand, was born in 1990 in Paris and has lived for about a decade in Los Angeles, where he began his self-taught painting practice. His work is rooted in a highly precise form of abstraction, composed of mathematically repeated triangles within a strict, pre-defined colored grid. While these two painters emerge from vastly different worlds, they share more common ground than one might initially think. Even before paint touches canvas, both artists engage in rigorous, methodical processes. Wuidar draws dozens of miniature geometric compositions in a sketchbook, each constrained within a small frame and filled with color. Out of hundreds of such studies, one will be chosen to be realized on a larger scale. Soumahoro, for his part, develops his compositions through a rationalized, near-ritualistic method: a quasi-algorithmic calculation determines the repetition of motifs, each color is assigned a number, each brush—never more than 5 millimeters wide—is chosen specifically for the painting at hand, and a piece of music is selected to accompany the entire creative process.

Beyond a shared vocabulary of abstract forms and a vivid chromatic palette, both artists’ paintings draw on extra-pictorial references. Wuidar’s geometric shapes recall his childhood memories—particularly the gestures of cutting performed by his father, a tailor in Liège. Meanwhile, the colorful repetitions in Soumahoro’s work evoke the vibrant textiles of Ivorian culture, from which the artist descends. However, while Soumahoro’s technique leaves traces of the hand—his paintings embrace their materiality—Wuidar’s surfaces display flawlessly smooth fields of color. Yet both artists’ abstractions possess a shared uniqueness: a fascination with unstable geometries.

The pictorial worlds of Wuidar and Soumahoro are animated by a common tension, between meaningful abstraction and pure abstraction. It is from this very tension that their paintings draw their power. In this unique dialogue, Brooklin A. Soumahoro offers a compelling counterpoint and a distinctly contemporary resonance to the parallel history of abstraction so singularly embodied in Léon Wuidar’s work.

– Marjolaine Lévy