
Room, 1999
oil on canvas /177.0 X 126.0 cm

Body, 1990
oil on canvas / 49.0 X 35.0 cm

The Rabbit, 1994
oil on canvas / 59.3 X 71.5 cm

Mayhem, 2003
Oil on canvas
Born Mortsel, Belgium 1958 Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium
'Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void', the Flemish artist Luc Tuymans has said. 'The observer should become motionless before the picture [and] freeze [in] a kind of picture-terror. I show pictures with a direct intention. The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that lie or she does not experience directly, but from a distance, initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level. Something quite unmistakable then triggers certain emotions, makes certain demands. This can only come about in a certain silence, [like] the silence before a storm. It is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of deja vu.
Before turning to painting, Tuymans was a filmmaker;
perhaps his decision to change media was for the sake of silencing his images. The silence of Tuymans' paintings is extreme, like that of a corpse. Indeed, his works seem more dead than alive, resurrecting the ghosts of past histories that are themselves shrouded in silence, such as Nazism or Belgium's colonial past. Elsewhere Tuymans revives the cloudy, forgotten details of personal memory, for example in the patterns of a kitchen towel, the illustrations of a medical handbook, or the recollections of a play that Tuymans attended with his parents in the 1970s. His pictures are
discomforting, as if diseased, and yet their delicacy and connection with the past call to mind gentle memories of childhood, of partial glimpses into an adult world of hushed secrets.
'Painting is utterly soundproof', Tuymans has said. 'It does not make noise, or remind one of music.' His work does not stray into simulating other media but remains very deliberately confined to what painting does best: it is utterly mute, still and flat. It functions through genres: landscape, portrait and still-life. The colours are faded, like a whisper, while his choice of images borders on the indecipherable; his is neither a random nor fully understandable choice of subject matter. 'Everything could be painting', says Tuymans, 'Or, in fact, everything just is painting.'
No discussion of contemporary painting is complete without referring to Tuymans' work. Throughout the 1990s up to the present he has, perhaps more than am oilier recent painter, kept alive the possibility of painting as a viable art form whilst admitting to its position on the 'peripheral outskirts of the art world'. 'Painting should mute its image, deny its real proportions and colour, and be difficult in terms of being memorized', he has said. His silent pictures cannot be memorized, yet remain unforgettable.
(Hamza Walker)
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