Luc Tuymans
"Luc Tuymans" by David Gleeson, Spring 2010, pp. 100-101
The last big Tuymans show I saw was at London’s Tate Modern about five years ago. Despite its simple, pallid colouring, the work was appealing, but also mysterious: while the apparently tired, flat picture planes seemed not to justify the reputation afforded the artist, they did have enough allure to grab my attention. And something that puzzling usually repays another look.
This exhibition proves the point, as I came away more sympathetic to and more fascinated with Tuymans than before. Whether it was the way the paintings were hung in the Wexner’s quirky but superb galleries that did it or simply that this show was a more capable edit of the artist’s oeuvre I am not sure.
What I am now sure of, however, is Tuymans’s position as an expert chronicler of modern history, one who may even rival that other behemoth of the recycled image, Gerhard Richter. To understand the huge scope of his work, imagine having to select 70 images that convey the state of man, the universe and just about everything else. Tuymans not only rises to this task but emerges from this outing as a more overtly polemical figure than I had hitherto thought.
Given the general art-world admiration directed at him, it is hard to believe that this is the painter’s first U.S. retrospective. The Wexner Center galleries—devised to fill an awkwardly shaped site—proved perfect for a grand debut, providing ideal spaces for thematic groupings while not overwhelming works that might appear slight or anemic. The exhibition began with a series of images from the 1980s that, in their almost self-effacing simplicity, had the look of empty, flat CCTV footage. The stillness and simplicity of Tuymans’s work demands silent contemplation, and it is here that each picture yields a narrative that is usually completely at odds with its initial blandness. The repetitive pattern of Our New Quarters (1986) becomes the gas ovens of Theresienstadt and the drab interior of Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) (1986) is exactly that: the grand horror of these locations is casually concealed among other studies of trees and wallpaper. As in his later portrait of a Klan leader, The Heritage VI (1996), Tuymans deceptively and masterfully presents the mundane banality of horror. These images are presented as starkly as, say, Buttonhole or Wrapping Paper (both 1991), ultimately leaving the viewer unsure of what point, if any, the painter is making.
But towards the end of the exhibition it becomes easier to discern his attitude. The Secretary of State (2005) is a close-cropped portrait of Condoleezza Rice that presents her not as the accomplished face of equal opportunity in the Republican Party but rather as a thin-lipped automaton from a paranoid and besieged government. A series of Belgian Congo paintings from 2000 implicate no one loudly but are heavy with the tragic 1961 murder of that country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Despite his quietly leaving you alone with your feelings, it feels as though Tuymans has, in his own elegant way, become more articulate.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
