Between mind and matter: René Guiette

René Guiette: the essence of the bird

“J’ai de l’oiseau,” wrote René Guiette. It is true! He had much in common with this light, graceful creature, sharing its colours, its songs, and its lightness. His work sings it—not with an audible song, but with a silent one that can only be heard by those who have sought the ineffable and the immortal. Guiette spent his entire life searching for the unnameable, especially in the house of Le Corbusier, which was his heaven. His quest was not only aesthetic, but also spiritual, using paint to draw the spiritual out of matter.

His work evolved from expressionism to cubism and then to a new primitivism, in which he sought to paint the authentic essence of simple things: an egg, a chair, a bird. At the end of the 1940s, these objects disappeared into the material and revealed a wonder: they became enigmatic signs, emerging from the material itself. In the 1950s, these signs entered the canvas, but little by little, purification followed proliferation, making way for an echoing emptiness, a state of full awareness.

This is the artist’s Zen period, a profound meditation in which the act of painting became a means of attaining self-knowledge. The works created between 1962 and 1970 show a sparing use of means, transforming the canvas into a space of abundance. Guiette, imbued with Zen thought, paints Eastern signs and turns his work into a mirror of his inner life. Emptiness leaves no room for excess; he does not reason—he resonates.

His creations resonate with his inner life and reveal the sacredness of the materials he uses. From 1957 onwards, he painted smaller works on paper, in which the sign emerges with formal perfection. They bear witness to his meditation and invite us all to reach our own inner space. In this way, René Guiette offers us not only works of undeniable beauty, but also spaces of fullness in which an Eastern-inspired sign, a curve, an arabesque, beats like a heart that has rediscovered its original state—and that is bliss.

The works presented at the Maurice Verbaet Gallery whisper to us that he found it. And they confirm that René Guiette indeed had something of a bird.

Author: Xavier Van den Broeck

MVGallery, Knokke (2018-2025)