Luc Tuymans at Palazzo Grassi, Venice
In this first solo show in Italy, Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel, Belgium) takes over the Palazzo Grassi. Under the curatorial direction of Caroline Bourgeois, “La Pelle” (The Skin) gathers together more than 80 works taken from the Pinault Collection, from international museums, and from private collections. Together they exemplify the trajectory of his pictorial art from 1986 to today.
L’OFFICIEL ART: The title of your show “La Pelle” means “skin” in Italian and makes reference to the eponymous novel by Curzio Malaparte, published in 1949. How are these different considerations called into play at Palazzo Grassi?
LUC TUYMANS: Actually, Malaparte wasn’t the most important reference in putting the exhibition together. That book was more like part of the background. The very heart of the exhibition – la pelle – has to do with the skin of the painting. The idea for the exhibition comes from a type of “momentariness.” My goal is not to be aligned with just the here and now. It’s not retrospective either, because two-thirds of the work is rather recent, from 2015 to 2018. Malaparte’s work is a sort of pretext, however, replete with meaning, characterized by a megalomaniac dimension. But we are now beyond literature. The exhibition takes place in Italy, and, in a certain way, other suggestions inform the show: a large mosaic based on work from 1990, a painting (Secrets) that invokes the idea of fascism… From the moment you enter Palazzo Grassi, you will undoubtedly be able to see elements of my other work, but I decided to try to find a visual connection among the various veins that run through the exhibition.
“You cannot imagine what man is capable of, what heroisms and infamies, to save his skin. This dirty skin,” Malaparte wrote. Whether you are on the side of the oppressors or the oppressed, history is a long illustra
tion of this maxim… Is your work a metaphor for individual history or collective history?
I’m not a history painter in the strictest sense of the term. But my paintings do contain forms of reminiscence, principally those tied to the concept of power, and its corollaries: physical and psychological violence. Wherever we live in the world, we live in a time of great confusion: revolutions, nationalist retrenchment, slavery… And in the face of this, there is what the media do to this material, their way of perverting it. We can’t be complicit with History. The exhibition takes on several crucial themes, such as colonialism, the Second World War… but in a diffuse way, never straight on. I don’t forget that Venice is a rather “perverted” city: a city of luxury that, speaking of history, played a critical role in geopolitics, having been a crucial staging ground on the way to the East. Different elements cross through one another, or coexist, and architecture here has a type of decadence. So the exhibition takes shape in a novel manner, while integrating the notion of time.
What were your conversations like with Caroline Bourgeois, the curator, while you tried to bring together in a narrative on how you were going to use your “carte blanche” privileges in this space?
For two years, Caroline Bourgeois and I have chosen to work on the principle of breath, a way of circulating within a specific environment. Over this period of preparation the idea has evolved, though in keeping with our original vision.
Your modus operandi involves a primary iconographic document (a photo, a televised image, a newspaper) from which you paint a universe. What do you mean by “authentic falsification”? What made you develop this technique?
This takes me back to my first attempts at art, when I was eighteen. I’m sixty today. Back then, I had to find a conceptual tool in order to be able to paint. The idea was to compose works that, for the viewer, could have been made thirty years earlier. To put in place a gap of time. I’ve always felt a sort of defiance when it comes to images, in terms of their “veracity.” Looking back, I think I was right in adopting this disposition. The work becomes charged with an implicit ambiguity. My initial technique evolved over the years, in the sense that I began to appropriate elements like documents, which I rework in order to integrate them into a pictorial vision. My objective has been not to conceptualize an image, itself already chock full of references, but to explore a certain pictorial nature in those references. When I come to an understanding of the meaning in the images, I have to make sure that I know which way I will paint them.
This exhibition brings together old work and recent work. How do you interpret the path of your work since the mid-1980s?
I stopped painting at the end of the 1970s. Then I made films for five years. I had felt like my work was too tormented, that I no longer had enough distance from it. That period allowed me to find the right distance I needed to make images. When I started to paint again, I worked with drawings, sketches, along the lines of a very “narrative” approach, far from any gestural painting. It was a project carried out in reaction against my own aestheticism. That is, after 660 paintings… Over the years my modus operandi has evolved, in the sense that I now have many more pictorial elements that I rework, revisit, that
I let expand in one way or another. The photographer is in the moment, but I will never be in the moment, I always arrive too late. With film, one can edit what one is filming. There’s a similarity to painting in the sense that one doesn’t “capture” an image, one approaches it. Otherwise, to come squarely to terms with the new media, rather than waging an open battle I think it is more fruitful to incorporate them into our toolbox, and to imagine a way of using them as a pictorial element.
“Luc Tuymans: La Pelle.” Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection, Venice. Through January 6, 2020.