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Luc Tuymans, a Belgian artist who emerged in the 1980s, is considered to be one of the most important contemporary painters. This comprehensive study of his work looks mainly at his paintings, for which he is best known, but also investigates his ventures into film. The book includes an interview with the artist and several essays that address the major themes of Tuymans’ work. 

Central to Tuymans’ work is the idea of memory as an important yet unreliable source, which is in its very nature selective and subjective. The paint itself in Tuymans’ work is a metaphor for the traits of memory. Painting always reveals traces of its making and thus the medium is an extension of the idea that the past is always present. Painting, like memory can only be an “authentic forgery.” Thoughts of the Holocaust permeate his paintings; however, this concern is not only found in his paintings, which deal literally and specifically with the Holocaust as subject matter. There are reminders throughout his work of other wars and a sense that the atrocities of the Holocaust do not only exist in our collective subconscious but are continued today and will be repeated in the future.

Tuymans speaks of our “collective memory of the Nazi camps” and sees the Nazis “Final Solution” as a metaphor for the culture we live in today. His work can be seen as a criticism and deconstruction of the rise and growing influence of neo-Fascism in Europe and the danger it represents. This brooding violence is also suggested in his portrait of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Republic of the Congo, the implication being that the dangers of nationalism are a global problem not limited to Europe. The grand narrative of the progress of history is undermined as Tuymans suggests the rise of a new world order that will continue to perpetuate the mistakes of the past.

Despite the visual frenzy and the colourful noise of popular media with which we are surrounded today, Tuymans’ paintings linger. However, the intense quietness that envelops them must not be mistaken for a refuge. His subject matter is often the banal: chairs, empty rooms, a pair of glasses on a table; scenes of ordinary-looking objects and places interspersed with images of the human body. The mute, monochromatic tones of the paintings make the horror at the core of his work unapparent at first; in his work beauty exists only as a perversion. Tuymans writes that “violence is the only structure underlying my work” and we see that a non-descript empty room is in fact a gas chamber. Tuymans’ nostalgia is a “notion related to horror” – even in his wistful works with innocent titles, such as Geese (a copy of a picture of ducks he had in his room as child), terror and disease skulk.

In his portraits, painted in flattened, bleached colours, we are confronted with the shells of people: disembodied, their bodies like lifeless dolls, their faces blank. The subjects of these portraits bring to mind T. S. Eliot’s “hollow, stuffed men” (The Hollow Men). Tuymans asserts that in order to paint portraits he needs illness as a pretext and that the portraits are “symptoms of illness.” This is clear in his “Der diagnostische Blick” series, where one is confronted with the vacant stares of the sick. For all their subtlety the portraits are not fragile and exert a quiet power over the viewer, as one is faced with the fact that one’s own face may not be very different from the faces one looks into.

Tuymans maintains that all his paintings must have a “weak spot” in order for the viewer to enter them. Tuymans creates his weak spots with his tones and use of paint, which suggest soft body tissues. Hence, even still life and more abstract works contain an element of the human body. It is this constant, subtle reference to the degenerating human body, unflinchingly pointing out the viewer’s own vulnerability against time that provides the “weak spot” through which the viewer can enter the work. One enters Tuymans’ paintings to find oneself the subject of investigation. This is perhaps why, in world saturated with so much visual blare, such quiet images prove to be so haunting.

“Every art had failed. How we fail is another matter”
      Luc Tuymans
- Katrine Claasens

Keywords: David-Krut, International, Luc-Tuymans, Painting, review