Luc Tuymans: Against the Day

W I E L S – B R U S S E L

L u c  T u y m a n s

AGAINST THE DAY

23 April – 02 August 2009

This first solo show of Luc Tuymans in Brussels presents, in world premiere, twenty  new paintings which he created especially for Wiels.

This is the first solo exhibition of Luc Tuymans in Brussels. The artist will present, in world premiere, twenty new paintings. The works are the third and last part of a triptych that began with the series Les Revenants about the power of the Jesuit Order and continued with Forever. The Management of Magic, about the Walt Disney phenomenon.

In this new series, Tuymans continues his work focusing on virtual reality, fantasies and illusions in images and concentrates on virtual images and images without any sense of reality. Thus, Tuymans continues his research on the illusion and manipulation of images and gives answers through his painting practice. Most or practically all of Tuymans’ paintings are based upon already represented imagery, ranging from drawings, photographs, found images, film-stills, Polaroid’s, etc. He calls his work ‘authentic forgeries’, convinced that original images do not exist and that every image is derived from another. He uses family pictures and historical images as representations of social-political taboos and a traumatic past.

The function of the close-up, the framing and other visual principles, which the artistsappropriated from cinema, is remarkable. Tuymans used to make films and the storyboard – like drawings such as Lift (1980) demonstrate his cinematographic point of view. In Blacklight (1994), a chair, a sofa, a standard lamp and a television set are crowded in the right corner of the images, as if we are looking in through a swerving camera. The framing suggests a snapshot of a passing movement and enlarges the sense of impending doom. The image is never fragmented. The image is fragmentary as a whole. It finds itself somewhere between spectator and image, in a claustrophobic place of non-communication, as an accomplished fact, as the silent weight of deceit, memory and trauma before or after an event.
Through mimicry, the artist realises a reconstruction. The imagery permits different interpretations and several layers of meaning, therefore it can only be perceived as ambiguous and dubious.

Tuymans is one of the most respected painters of his generation. His work is largely included in prominent international museums, e.g. the Museum Of Modern Art in New York and the National Museum of Modern Art Georges Pompidou Centre Paris. He participated in important exhibitions such as Documenta IX 1992. He had a solo exhibition in 2002 in Helsinki. In 2004, Tate Modern London (UK) scheduled a great solo show of his paintings.

This exhibition travelled to the K21 Kunstsammlung Düsseldorf (GER). He participated in the Biennale di Sao Paulo del Brasile in 2004. Several major solo exhibitions were planned in 2007, including a retrospective at Haus der Kunst, München (D) and a show at Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp (BE). In 2008, Forever. The Management of Magic was organized at David Zwirner, New York, NY. In 2009, the exhibition Against The Day will be held at Wiels which will travel to Rooseum-Moderna Museet in Stockholm (SV). In 2010, several American museums have invited Tuymans to have a large solo exhibition at their institutes.

Luc Tuymans commentary “Against the Day”

“I adopted the title Against the Day from a book by Thomas Pynchon (2006). Thomas Pynchon is my favourite American author and one of the inventors of paranoia in American literature.”

There is an anonymization of the painting (Ed. The Game Warden, Fernand Khnopff, 1883, coll. Stâdelmuseum Frankfurt a/M) which fascinated me to such an extent that I linked one of my own most recent paintings to it: Against the Day. My painting was probably painted against an entirely different ideational background – but then again there are affinities. And not simply because there is also a tree. My tree, of course, is the one in my little city garden behind my own house. Once I furnished a colleague with a cap, a blue jacket and a shovel with which he shovelled the soil. He was completely engrossed in this work. His facial features can no longer be recognized. One has an inkling of his face, one senses it, but it is ultimately not important

whether one figures out who it is or what this person is feeling. This person is part of the hermetic scene – as in the Khnopff. Here the time of day is defined. It is a nocturne. It is a painting not so very much concerned with nature. It is a painting that actually takes place off in a corner, facing the viewer, showing the act of shovelling. In the foreground, the overexposed, colourful image of a tree appears, depicting a kind of blur. The latter contrasts with the unbelievably elaborate development of the rest of the depiction. This painting also has something to do with a fascination, an aspect which, in turn relates back to the conceivable cynicism of a man like Fernand Khnopff, who was a member of society’s upper class and could therefore naturally take various liberties. The French, and above all the French authors and intellectuals, considered Fernand Khnopff the only truly important Belgian artist aside from Félicien Rops. Something that naturally flattered both of them. Khnopff’s favourite time of the year – as he always said – was the autumn.

The painting Against the Day will serve as the title motif for an exhibition by the same name, which I’m planning for next year (scheduled to open on 23 April 2009 at the Kunsthalle Wiels in Brussels). I adopted the title Against the Day from a book by Thomas Pynchon (2006). Thomas Pynchon is my favourite American author and one of the inventors of paranoia in American literature. But there is also something else to which the painting makes reference: to the book Oil by Upton Sinclair, which was adapted to the screen in 2007 by Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood. The film pursues the idea of minimalism, a certain banality. More specifically,banality in the sense of reality – regardless of how the latter is actually shaped, whether it is triggered artificially, through scenography, or not.

For me, already in reaction to my previous exhibitions, a certain idea developed – and this is precisely what interests me about Khnopff: the evacuation of the utopia. The evacuation of the utopia took place gradually over time and through history – actually like a form of pornography though one which associated itself with a person on a mental level. The evacuation of the utopia goes above and beyond the banality of this painting, which is a domesticated painting because it is concerned with a specific territory such as, for example, the pictorial field. For me, a further thought develops toward the idea of a virtual reality, in which already now one constructs people in their entirety and then plays them back into a scene. Usually the latter is a computer image and it is no longer clear whether the figure is real or not. This image has been created with a perfection of the kind applied so many centuries ago by Van Eyck, now, however, with a machine. This is how the Big Brother reality shows and horror broadcasts work, which – with the aid of the forensic sciences – are robbed of the whole utopia through reassembly, reconstruction.

Luc Tuymans in : “Reconsidered”, Selected Works from the Städel Collection, Städel Museum, Frankfurt a/M, 2008, p. 50-51.

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