Toon Leën’s work moves between painting, video, and lecture performance.
It explores questions of authorship and authenticity, abstraction and empathy, and the agency of images. In 2025, Leën defended his PhD in Artistic Research at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD, School of Arts. His dissertation, titled Image Entanglements, was accompanied by four lecture performances, A Big Basket of Apples (2022–2025), Homage to an Absent Pony (2023–2025), Homage to the Dash (2022–2025) and The Irresistible Image and the Sceptical Gaze (2023–2025). The solo exhibition he created for Fred&Ferry (February–March 2022) presented a series of abstract paintings and a video lecture on coups d’état by the fictional artist Sarah Bal. Earlier projects include a lecture performance on colour blindness, titled Sarah Bal, Student of Colours (2019), and the concert lecture Correspondances mystérieuses, in collaboration with pianist Lucas Blondeel (2019–2021), which reflects on the relation between music and the visual arts, through the example of Claude Debussy. His lecture performances The Case of the Ridiculous Curator (2018) and The Ego Trip and the Research Pill (2016), as well as the short video Zwischen den Bildern (2020), and the lecture and eponymous artist book Personally, I’m Most Interested in the Shapes and Colours (MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2015) explore the staging of authorship and authority in the context of the visual arts through the perspective of a fictional curator called Ludovik Vermeersch.