Luc Tuymans (Photo: Grant Delin, courtesy David Zwirner, Ny)
Luc Tuymans has painted figurative works because the mid 1980s and few artists can be as closely identified with a particular palette. His taste for mouldy pastels, cool greys and dead plaster white lead to blurred, obtuse images. This reductive painting color represents the elusive nature of history and memory, reflecting the artist’s belief that representation are only able to be partial and subjective. Loaded political themes are developed in seemingly tangential ways using the Holocaust, Belgium’s controversial role in post-colonial Congo (the influential “Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man” series that has been shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale) and the US a reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks given an oblique, fragmented treatment. The diversity of Tuymans’s subject matter, this encompasses banal paraphernalia for example wallpaper patterns and tea settings, goes hand-in-hand with his use of varied source material utilized by photography, film and tv.
The latter features prominently in Tuymans’s first major Russian show at the Red October Chocolate Factory opening this month. Twenty new works, first shown in Brussels earlier this year, examine TV reality shows and also the internet. The exhibition, area of the Moscow Biennale, forms section of a Tuymans onslaught this autumn with the artist’s first US retrospective also opening this month in the Wexner Center for your Arts in Ohio plus an exhibition curated by Tuymans as well as the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opening at Bozar in Brussels.
The Art Newspaper: You once asserted your strategy is “borne away from a genuine distrust of imagery”? What can you mean?
Luc Tuymans: Well, being part of the tv generation means there is already an overload of imagery available. But many of the imagery is not lived through but simply seen, otherwise you pretend you’ve at least seen certain images, and this implies that there has to be a huge amount of distrust towards what you’re taking a look at. The practice of painting is a lot more of your habit, rather than being something exquisite. If you try to create a style or refine your painting mode, you just lose the intensity of as soon as.
TAN: Much has been created with the must “decode” work with viewers seeking to your titles for guidance. Can you place an excessive amount of responsibility around the spectator to unravel your images?
LT: First, you should not underestimate the public and try to be overly didactic that your problem with institutions is obviously; they force one to produce text after text. For my Tate Modern show [2004], the education department wanted bigger captions but I wanted to be less visible. There have been already explanations outside each gallery but each picture also required texts. We fought over it.
I started off as a possible artist to demythologize myself by providing the source material I’ve used. Journalists liked this, they knew what to write about me but down the road they hated me for it because without the explanations, they couldn’t comment on me. It’s a controversy that really just exists on television. My ultimate aim is to detach myself completely and appear inside my works being a spectator would that is an aspiration.
TAN: Has your use of the bleached and blurred image reached the edge?
LT: That relies. A number of the later works are in reality extremely colorful, like Orchid (2008). The blurriness is in fact sharp because, unlike with [Gerhard] Richter, it is not wiped away but merely painted. Painting is definitely a physical object; it’s extremely tough to compromise it. It’s difficult to remember it correctly because it’s so complex. But it’s far more detailed than any photograph will ever be. But when you may well ask individuals to remember a picture or painting, they’ll remember the photograph the size, colors, etc.
TAN: Can you believe art historians will credit your muted palette with making a new sort of reductive form? Or can you rather they labelled a post-modern history painter?
LT: Well, neither of these. I might considerably happier if academics understood thinking about understatement. Art techniques are not something you must imply is political. Art just isn't political, every day life is political. Isms, for example modernism, post-modernism, etc, they’re just not applicable to the world we reside in. The complete practice of painting is approximately a pair of things: timing and precision.
TAN: It’s well documented your childhood was dominated by various schisms within your family within the fallout of Wwii. Can you explain how your personal history retains a direct effect on your vision?
LT: My mother was Dutch, my pops was Flemish. Both of them lost brothers during the war. My father’s mother, she was obviously a fanatic and determined to send her children to German schools. By the end of the war, my father were able to take his brothers out of school but he couldn’t save among his younger siblings. Thirty-five years later, I was having dinner inside my parents’ house when my father took a mobile phone call. He went completely white as they had just discovered that this younger brother had died as an SS mascot, having a bayonet as part of his belly.
On a historical level, WWII could have destroyed the whole of Europe even though the Holocaust was a psychological breakdown of sorts. And these things completely shaped this place in the world and the US. So yes, the war has provided a simple underlying structure. I always saw it on two levels; on a personal level and then it grew into an understanding of why situations are shaped because they are now. It triggered the Cold War, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden-they’re all creations with the west.
TAN: So would you agree that your tasks are deeply personal instead of historical?
LT: It is commonly many former compared to latter. Needless to say, it’s been triggered by things which I’m not totally aware, otherwise I wouldn’t take action. Every visual is at opposition to language if we could say everything, why create a picture from it?
TAN: So that you are ultimately worried about the fragile nature of memory in terms of both personal and historical events?
LT: It always remains fragile. Every facet of history is partly false, it’s never complete, and history writing are only able to be factual to some extent.
TAN: But your recent art, such as your works on view in Moscow which explore aspects of virtual reality present in shows as well as on the internet, appears to be about disengagement from contemporary realities.
LT: “Against the Day”, the show’s title, is obtained from among my favourite novels by Thomas Pynchon. It’s in regards to the invention of paranoia in US literature. I’ve already been influenced from the 2008 films “There Will is Blood”, “No Country for Old Men” and “Control”. On the cynical level, these films achieve something the art world hasn't yet understood for the reason that, in a sort of a reductive way, they work with a narrative on the different level. For example, there isn't any dialogue for 15 minutes at the outset of “There Will probably be Blood” that is amazing. Two works on show in Moscow, Contrary to the Day I and From the Day II [a diptych showing a gardener digging], capture the effect of pressing the pause of the TV handheld remote control. But they’re a combination of things set right into a scene which are not real.
And you have “virtual” ideas which are far more instant. An assistant of Fan Di’an [director of National Art Museum, Beijing] took a photograph of me as well as the red focus light distorted the image [I-phone, 2008]. It will likely be interesting to view these works poor how Moscow is developing; it’s a brutal city.
TAN: Would you ever make works together certain collectors at heart?
LT: No, I would never do that. What is more important is the fact that together with my dealers, we’ve always guarded the job inside the sense that it will not crop up an excessive amount of at auction and when it can, it will cost you the proper price, or we merely buy it back. I’m perfectly alert to the overall game with Charles Saatchi who bought pieces about the secondary market for his “Triumph of Painting” exhibition in 2005 after which dumped them following your show. The united states tour should result in steady sales.
TAN: Are you currently pleased with picking a works best for your US tour?
LT: Yes, it’s taken a long time for any US institution must me to do a show. You can find 76 works. I’ve installed all 80 of my solo shows myself. This is the very first time I can trust other curators to put in my art. They’ve decided to re-create three exhibitions as they were shown in commercial galleries [“At Random”, Zeno X gallery, Antwerp, 2004; “Der Architekt”, Galerie Gebauer, Berlin, 1998; “Mwana Kitoko”, David Zwirner, Ny, 2000] after which works for this chronologically. It’s interesting as they’re not probably the most iconic works.
TAN: How will you think US audiences will respond to work?
LT: The Demolition painting (2005) will be shown that has 9/11 connotations combined with the Condoleezza Rice portrait (The Secretary of State, 2005). Museum people didn’t buy it at that time as it was too topical. But then Glenn Lowry, MoMA director, chose to acquire it because she’s a public figure [Tuymans’s US dealer David Zwirner gave the painting to MoMA being a fractional gift in 2006]. It had been misunderstood in the private collection, it absolutely was unnatural. The fact it’s been acquired by a public collection can be an interesting understanding of the way the United states citizens think.
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