LUC TUYMANS: “WHY I STILL PAINT”

SINCE THE MID 1980S, THE BELGIAN ARTIST HAS BEEN ONE OF THE KEY FIGURES IN THE PAINTING RENAISSANCE WITH CANVASES THAT QUESTION THE MORES OF OUR IMAGE-SATURATED SOCIETY. NUMÉRO ART SPOKE TO HIM ON THE OCCASION OF A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE AT THE PINAULT COLLECTION IN VENICE.

“I’m always asked why I still paint.” Dragging on at least his tenth cigarette since we sat down to talk in his Antwerp studio, Luc Tuymans looks me straight in the eye. “Because I’m not stupid.” His words, like his paintings, take time to comprehend. In Venice, for example, he’s laid a mosaic on the floor of the atrium at the Palazzo Grassi: visitors walk over it, dazzled by the shimmering tesserae whose hues echo the marble surroundings. It’s only later, from the upper floors, that they make out its subject – a stand of darkgreen trees on a pale background. And it’s only on considering the work’s title – Schwarzheide – that they glean a clue to its origin: the Schwarzheide camp housed Jewish slave labourers during World War II, some of whom secretly made artworks which they cut into strips so as to hide them – Tuymans’s work is based on a reconstituted drawing by Alfred Kantor. By the time you’re upstairs, the perverse mechanics of his piece have already caught you in their grip: in total ignorance, you trampled over the horrors of war, and perhaps even marvelled at their beauty. Now you’ve cottoned on, is the work less beautiful?

Born in 1958, Tuymans studied fine art in Belgium before briefly abandoning painting for film. He came back to art

in the mid-1980s, becoming one of the main figures in the revival of painting. His method is invariable: canvases are realized in just one day, generally a Thursday, from a prexistant image, most often a Polaroid or an iphone photo. “Because an iphone photo is almost as ugly as a Polaroid,” he says. “And the Polaroid is an emulsion, it develops like the way I paint – first the lightest hues, then the more contrasted zones.”

With its 83 works, Tuymans’s exhibition-event at the Pinault Collection allows us to understand his style – its muted tones (“I need a lot of colours to get to these grisailles”), its flattened perspectives (even if he rejects the term), his figures and landscapes that become more abstract as one approaches them. “I really like abstract painting,” he says. “But I’m not like Rothko who wanted people to cry in front of his works. Actually I find that a bit stupid.” Tuymans chooses his subjects from the vast database in his studio and from memory, images that work on his mind until they become ripe for a canvas – once again, a question of time. His sources are diverse: a dehumanized child’s face from the 1960 film Village of the Damned ( The Valley, 2007); a smartphone shot of a documentary about the Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa ( Issei Sagawa, 2014).

Many evoke atrocities, World War II and the holocaust in particular – Tuymans likes to poke a finger where it hurts. At the top of the Palazzo Grassi’s staircase visitors are confronted with the portrait of a sleeping or pensive man. Secrets (1990) is a picture of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister. Critics have often interpreted

Tuymans’s paintings as a pictorial response to Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil. But on the other hand, it’s not Speer that Tuymans has painted, nor his banality – what he has painted is an image of Speer, what interests him being the value of the image, more than the value of the subject of the image. “Painting has always been man’s first way of conceptualizing an image. A painter is not naive,” he explains. His perversity – touching us with the image of a Nazi dignitary or making us enjoy a representation of the horrors of war – isn’t so much his as that of our image system, based in the belief that photographs represent reality, “a message without code,” as Barthes put it. Tuymans shows that, on the contrary, all images are coded constructions, a staging of the real and thus an instrument of power for those wish to hide or reveal, to show themselves in a flattering light or others as monsters. Who would have thought that an artist of the old medium – painting – would be the ideal weapon to respond to our society of the spectacle, our world of post- and alternative truth?

In this age of continuous images, Tuymans offers us a painting made of flesh. Or rather skin, as the Italian title – La Pelle – of his Venice show makes clear. “Painting fills an urgent need of lived experience amid the fluid wraiths of digital apparition,” summarizes Jarrett Earnest in the exhibition catalogue. It’s not surprising to hear Tuymans get riled up about “academics who have written whole dissertations without ever having seen a physical painting.” Sitting in his studio armchair, Tuymans declares that “painting is anachronistic.” We’ve gone beyond it? No, anachronistic because it takes us out of the present flow of images, gives

us some distance. Its pigments, its surface effects, its gestures recorded in the canvas are all disruptions that catch our attention. Time is suspended, our minds engaged – because we are no more stupid than Tuymans.

Tuymans describes himself as a “surgeon,” and his work does indeed dissect our society of images right down to its entrails, even if they remain out of sight ( Hitchcock showed us how much fear was born from what we cannot see). But Tuymans doesn’t stop there: “By dint of re-photographing, reworking on a computer, taking Polaroids of a photo, the image reaches such a state of weakness that it can become a painting. The picture is exhausted before I paint it. The resurrection comes with painting,” he explains. His Venice show, co- curated with Caroline Bourgeois, is dedicated entirely to this notion of understatement – this euphemism or fragility, the idea that we are always somehow short of the reality. An image will never be enough to speak of the world, nor all the evil that haunts it. The exhibition also portrays the artist as a painter of freedom, responsibility and political commitment – the freedom and responsibility of the visitor to seek out the information needed to understand the works; the engagement in a process of reflection on the state of our world that perhaps leads to political commitment, like that of Tuymans in his native Belgium. Or maybe instead to a more unconscious commitment. “There was this museum director who hated my work,” laughs Tuymans. “He came to my Tate Modern exhibition in 2004... He hated it even more. And then he ended up dreaming about my paintings. I think that today he’s my biggest fan.”