Luc Tuymans
° 1958
Since the 1970s, painting as an art has been declared to be dead more than once. Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, on the other hand, is someone who breathed new life into painting in Flanders. He had his first exhibition in 1988 – a full ten years after the creation of his first works – because, in his own words, he wanted to be more-or-less sure that he was ready. And yet, Tuymans’ work speaks to painting’s ‘impotence’ which, paradoxically, is also the source of its strength. The selective vagueness of our memories, as well, in part determines the stylistic characteristics of his paintings. They are usually of modest format, oftentimes with pale, muted, sparse colors and a strongly simplified figuration bereft of visual ‘detail’. Both individual as well as collective memory/past are important sources of inspiration for Tuymans, principally with respect to wartimes. The visual material from this period that is handed us, is carefully handled and commented upon in his works. Moreover, the medium of film and his experiments with it have indelibly marked Tuymans’ work, and he relates this to with the mechanism of memory: film is delivered to us as a still image, while painting spurs us to transpose images in movement. Tuymans keeps playing with the notion that meaning is more important than image. This is why he has in recent years – aside from wartime-related motifs – broached various other ‘loaded’ themes, like biblical topics, nationalism, intolerance and violence.
Luc Tuymans is a worldwide referential - and therewith also very expensive - artist. Part of his praxis is the realisation of paintings in situ, most often for temporary situations and therefore out of the market system, in a grand scale where Tuymans remains the painter and other artists are assisting him as external eyes during the process of realisation. In Moscow such a painting is a temporary reference in the central pavilion nr. 1. It is a version of his theme of ‘The Worshipper’, a cleric of indeterminate faith engaged in an ambiguous ceremony.
