Luc Tuymans (born 14 June 1958) is a Belgian visual artiste best known for his paintings which dissect people’s attachment with archives and buttonhole their triumph to ignore it. World War II is a recurring theme in his work. He is a key figure of the generation of European figurative painters who gained renown at a time in the impression of many believed the medium had aimless its relevance due to the new digital age.
Much of Tuymans’ work deals taking into consideration moral complexity, specifically the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. His subjects range from major historical endeavors such as the Holocaust to the seemingly inconsequential or banal: wallpaper, Christmas decorations or mysterious objects for example.
The artist’s sparsely-coloured symbolic paintings are made up of Fast brush strokes of wet paint. Tuymans paints from photographic or cinematic images drawn from the media or public sphere, as without difficulty as from his own photographs and drawings. They often appear deliberately out of focus. The blurred effect is, however, created carefully with painted strokes, it is not the outcome of a ‘wiping away’ technique.
Formal and conceptual oppositions recur in his work, which is echoed in his remark that while ‘sickness should play a part the artifice the painting is made’ there is moreover pleasure in its making – a ‘caressing’ of the canvas. This reflects Tuymans’ semantic shaping of the philosophical content of his work. Often allegorical, his titles build up a further deposit of imagery to his work – a buildup that exists more than the visible. The painting Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) exemplifies his use of titles to provoke contact in the mind of the viewer. Meaning, in his work, is never fixed; his paintings urge on thought. A amalgamated characteristic of Tuymans’ work is the pretension he often works in series, a method which enables one image to generate unorthodox through which images can be formulated and reformulated ad infinitum. Images are repeatedly analysed and distilled, and a large number of drawings, photocopies and watercolours are produced in preparation for his oil paintings. Each resolution painting is, however, completed in a single day.
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