Some weeks ago I received an email from Eva Vermandel, who was in Venice for the Biennale. She spoke highly of the exhibition by Luc Tuymans, the celebrated Belgian painter. These days I rarely travel, so I decided to look photographs and reviews on line. She was right. It is an exceptionally good-looking show, elegantly installed in the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, a flamboyant 18th century palace with internal renovations by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and now owned by the French billionaire and art collector François Pinault. The exhibition is called ‘La Pelle’ (‘The Skin’), its title taken from a 1949 novel by the Italian Curzio Malaparte, which details social and moral collapse in World War II, and including about eighty paintings, spanning Tuymans’ whole career, as well as a huge new mosaic, comprising thousands of tiny tiles, which is displayed in the columned atrium. The mosaic is based on his 1986 painting that in turn was inspired by drawings made by Alfred Kantor, a survivor from the Schwarzheide concentration camp, and it depicts dark pine trees against a white background. The composition is split by black vertical lines, a reference to how the original drawing was cut into strips to avoid its confiscation by guards. On the first level of the grand staircase of the Palazzo Grassi, emphasising the point, is a small portrait of the Nazi Albert Speer, architect and minister of armaments and war production.
Nothing is quite what it appears in Tuyman’s paintings, which are full of false trails, red herrings, and decoys. Typically, his images are somewhat bland, their colours faded and bleached, apparently innocuous and unremarkable scenes that are usually borrowed from other sources. Almost invariably, however, his images actually refer to ideologically charged subjects that are not at all obvious to the viewer, who has to rely on additional information to get their points. This obfuscation has helped him to become one of the most respected painters in the art world. Tuymans likes to think of his works as ‘authentic forgeries’, proposing that his paintings, like all images, offer only a limited understanding of reality, and that they are refracted through our own memories and preconceptions, both personal and collective. It is certainly true that without knowledge of their hidden meaning, Tuymans’ pictures can be deceptively empty.
When I worked with him at an exhibition at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery twenty years ago, Tuymans was as forceful and self-confident as he appears to be now. It had taken several attempts to convince him to show there, and when he came to install his precisely conceived exhibition he did so in a masterful way, having first made it clear that he had no interest in the interventions or opinions of curators, light-heartedly illustrating this by saying that he had once worked as a bouncer at a night club. He worked through the options methodically and carefully, making full use of negative space in the gallery, just as he has done at the Palazzo Grassi. At talks following the installation he told the audiences that he was the best painter in the world, with the possible exception of Gerhard Richter, and that he always finished his canvases in a day. Not all the artists in the audience found these statements totally convincing, and even now, thinking back to his performances,I don’t know if he was being provocative or ironic. He was an agreeable companion in a social context, and as he rarely smiles, it wasn’t easy to know when he was joking.
In recent interviews, Tuymans still goes against the grain. He talks, for instance, about what he believes to be the insane stupidity of the contemporary world and how, after the age of sixty, life is simply a process of ‘anger management’. Born in 1958, he now considers himself as part of a generation that ‘is over’. Perhaps, though, this rhetorical exaggeration is a way of emphasizing his seriousness and that of his paintings, precisely because their stylistic understatement often suggests otherwise. Significantly, he has also mentioned that his pictures, now extremely expensive, have been perfectly copied in China, adding that he finds the facsimiles meaningless because they lack ‘intentionality’. This distinction may buttress the financial value of his paintings, just as it is intended to justify the fundamental gravity of his practice, which he likes to present as a form of cultural resistance, but it is not entirely compelling. Tuymans’ melancholia is persuasive, but one of its consequences is the emptiness that lies at the heart of his work - a quality that makes his paintings acceptable both to rich collectors and to earnest, politically correct, critics.
http://www.evavermandel.com/
https://frieze.com/article/luc-tuymans-retrospective-palazzo-grassi-venice