"For me, Magritte is not a surrealist".
About the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, whose first solo exhibition in Paris took place this summer at the Zwirner Gallery.
Obviously, Luc Tuymans' painting is not cut off from the world. Far from it, since for each painting, it springs from his hand during a whole day, after months of research based on an image. An image that can just as easily be archival as current, that can just as easily evoke the Shoah or reality TV, news or entertainment, Covid or war. Nevertheless, Luc Tuymans' painting does not describe the world. Because painting is art. It is not the world. It is what it shows. And for the Belgian artist, the nuance is significant. For him, what he wants to do, while starting from a "kind of reality, which may or may not be experienced", are "things that have a significant scope and meaning, even if they are treated with humility".
In the 1990s, these 'things' established the 'philosopher-voyou of contemporary painting', as the writer Jarrett Earnest has called him, as a major figure on the current international contemporary art scene. In 1992, Luc Tuymans took part in Documenta 9 in Kassel and exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Bern. This was enough to make him noticed on the art market by all collectors and art galleries. In 2001 he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, the Tate Modern gave him a retrospective in London. On 22 May 2021, he exhibited at the Bourse du Commerce in Paris, joining the ten thousand works in François Pinault's collection: paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, sound works and installations from all over the world, which have become the most highly valued in the world. The paintings by Luc Tuymans in the Pinault Collection were first shown in 2006 in the exhibition "Where Are We Going?" at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. In 2019, he will design the exhibition 'La Pelle' in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois, the curator of the Pinault Collection.
"All the exhibitions I have done are built with a kind of narrative that can be associated with the experience of making films," explains the artist who gave up painting from 1981 to 1985 to try his hand at filmmaking and photography.
His approach to the image is reminiscent of the work of Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas: Luc Tuymans chooses archival images from the media, the cinema or websites, which he then photographs with his telephone or Polaroid camera, before letting them emerge for a long time from the nebula of his mind... to finally project them one day by his hand onto the canvas nailed to the wall. Like a residue. Like a trace. At that moment, the artist no longer wants to think. That is enough. He really lets his brain enter his hands, as he confided to Romain Mathieu who devoted an interview to him on the occasion of the first solo exhibition devoted to him this summer in Paris, published in the summer issue of Artpress. "There are conscious things and others that escape me when I paint. All the paintings are done in one day. There is an extreme intensity that is important to me because when I start working on an exhibition like this, all the images are already there, formulated, analysed. I never paint two images at a time but one a week, almost always on Thursday, as a kind of habit. When I start to paint, I don't want to think anymore, the brain enters the hands, according to an execution principle, like a surgery, something very precise. There are two intelligences, that of the head and that of the hand, which you can't always control.
All in halftones, as if the colours had dissolved between the vivid palette and the final painting, so extra thin are the layers of oil diluted with turpentine, Luc Tuymans' artworks finally spoke a lot this summer about looking and painting, about the ambiguity of the image in addition to the relationship to history in the immense New York art gallery that David Zwirner, his gallerist since 1994, has nestled in the middle of the Marais district in 2019. All the paintings for sale and viewing were painted in the previous year, especially for this exhibition entitled "Eternity", "in reference to a discussion with Timothy Snyder last year", explains Luc Tuymans to the contemporary art magazine critic. Author of On Tyranny (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the American historian develops two interesting principles: "Eternity refers to the development of neoliberalism, which is accompanied by a return to the past".
Eternity is now also the title of one of Luc Tuymans' recent paintings, which he poses in front of in this issue of Artpress. This painting is much more colourful, in this case red, than those about cosmonauts or pandemics, waiting rooms or surveillance. "This is a painting of a model that was used by the physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1937 so that the Germans could imagine the explosion of an atomic bomb. It is a glass construction that was found broken. It is a very large painting, with a red light radiating onto the floor. This red surface is also a reference to Rothko," explains Luc Tuymans. My work is not visceral like American painting can be.
For the Belgian born in 1958 in Mortsel, near Antwerp, of a Flemish father and a Dutch mother, his painting has necessarily to do with this particular place that is his. "You could say that painting was born in this region, which has gone through many changes of power. We had to survive and we realised that a certain opportunism towards reality was of interest. Belgium is something very recent, it was formed in 1830 and it is more a constitution than a country. If you go back in history from Van Eyck to Magritte and Broodthaers, this relationship with reality is constantly present. For me, Magritte is not a surrealist. The Betrayal of Images, where he paints a pipe and writes that it is not a pipe, shows the ambiguity in the image.