Don’t go to Luc Tuymans at the Wexner Center for the Arts expecting an easy aesthetic buzz, like the kind delivered by a 10-second glance at Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster. The Belgian painter’s first U.S. retrospective, filled with some 70 bleached-out, blurred canvases based on mundane photographic images, is demanding for many reasons, among them a preoccupation with the banality of evil. And, despite their eerie stillness, the works refuse to coalesce into coherent, fixed images with stable narratives.
Hailed as the most influential painter of his generation, the 51-year-old Tuymans is a star in Europe but comparatively unknown in the U.S. Inside the art world, though, the Antwerp-based artist is regarded as a superhero who, in the ’80s and ’90s, saved painting from certain death by fertilizing it with conceptualism. He spins an intricate web of relationships among his oil canvases and their titles, subjects, wall text, exhibition sites – even the anecdotal tidbits he tosses to writers and curators. Subjects range from Big Issues (the Holocaust, Belgian colonialism, Disneyfication, the Bush Administration and 9/11) to the ostensibly prosaic (lampshades, skillets, wallpaper patterns and water droplets).
Early Works
The Wexner show is chronologically sequenced, which allows viewers to trace the evolution of Tuymans’ 30-year career. Predictably, the show opens with “Gaskamer” (Gas Chamber), the work that got the artist noticed and was later christened “seminal” by critics. Pretend you’re looking at the work before noticing its title. It appears to be a klutzy student exercise in single-point perspective. A room is suggested by hastily sketched orthogonals that converge into a vanishing point, where a black rectangle suggests a door. Planes of thin, grayish wash suggest concrete walls. The viewer is positioned at the room’s far corner, staring at the door – surveying the scene or trapped? Other features materialize: perhaps a drain on the floor, light fixtures or pipes jutting from the ceiling. Muddy brown and yellow splotches cover the walls. What goes on in here? Glance at the work’s title and the daubs of black on the ceiling become showerheads. You need to leave this noxious, claustrophobic room – but what if you weren’t allowed? All this provoked by a small, seemingly crude painting.
The Tuymans exhibition catalog provides two sources for “Gaskamer’: a photograph of a gas chamber at Dachau (a Nazi death camp) and a watercolor Tuymans painted while visiting Dachau, which looks very similar to the source photo. One wonders if Tuymans’ watercolor sketch intentionally (or not) imitates photos he saw of Dachau prior to his visit, or if the sketch even exists. This begs the questions that Tuymans wants us to ask: How do mass media images affect the way we see – or frame – the world? Do they impose upon us a particular way of “seeing”? How is visual information altered when text is added? And what relevance can painting have in an age of mechanical reproduction? [Continued on page 2]
On November 13th, 2009 @ 10:40:pm, Ned Flanders said:
What a smart, incisive, engaging review. Finally -- finally! -- it looks like Northeast Ohio has a visual arts critic who knows how to enlighten readers without either condescending or pandering to them. Bravo, Ohio Authority. If the caliber of the rest of your pieces matches that of Ms. LeBeau's, then it's fair to say this new venture will be a resounding success. Ms. LeBeau, please keep the articles coming!