Luc Tuymans Captures the Moment

[Dave Monroe]

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT JULY 3, 2009
Luc Tuymans Captures the Moment
By J. S. MARCUS | Special to The Wall Street Journal


The contemporary art market may be in freefall, but Belgian painter
Luc Tuymans, long regarded as one of the art world's brightest stars,
is having a banner year. This spring, he opened a major installation
of recent work at the Wiels Contemporary Arts Center in Brussels;
later this fall, a full-scale retrospective of his work will begin a
16-month tour of the U.S.

An Antwerp native, Mr. Tuymans, now 51 years old, still lives and
works in his hometown. A self-taught student of film and a formally
trained artist, Mr. Tuymans first made his mark in the 1980s, when he
began to explore Europe's memories of World War II with harsh, elegant
paintings like "Gas Chamber" (1986), which depicts the Dachau
concentration camp with analytical despair and formal improvisation.

Mr. Tuymans combines a keen knowledge of the Flemish old masters with
an instinctively cinematic approach to painting. Though he may apply
his paint like an old master, he uses close-ups and framing devices
with the skill of a great 20th-century film director. Mr. Tuymans
often seems to court controversy. In 2001, he represented Belgium at
the Venice Biennale with a controversial installation that
investigated Belgium's longstanding taboo about its colonial legacy in
the Congo.

Mr. Tuymans current Brussels show, called "Against the Day" (through
Aug. 2), draws on a number of sources, like found photographs and
images transmitted by cellphone, as the basis for 20 paintings. The
title work is a magnificent diptych, which shows a fractured scene
staged in Mr. Tuymans's backyard. A gardener is caught in two separate
but related moments, turning the viewer into a kind of security
camera, impassively and sinisterly registering the movement of time.

We spoke to Mr. Tuymans at his Antwerp home....

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