The Decoder: Luc Tuymans, Wexner Center for the Arts

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"Schwarzheide" (1986)
Image courtesy of Wexner Center for the Arts

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?

“Gaskamer” is joined, in Tuymans’ first gallery, by more small, stark Holocaust-themed works from the 1980s, all in a muted palette of blacks, whites and grays. Four small oil paintings on cardboard make up “Die Zeit (Time),” 1988, a sort of filmic storyboard. The first work establishes the setting: a rural village square, or perhaps some barracks. Next we see what might be empty shelves, or are they empty death camp sleeping quarters? Then a close-up of two large discs (Tuymans says they’re spinach tablets, concentrated food developed by the Nazis). Finally, a crudely drawn man sits before bookshelves or an archive of sorts. Tuymans evidently ripped the man's impassive face from a photo in Signal, the major Nazi propaganda magazine, and painted hair and sunglasses on it. Curators claim the man is Reinhard Heydrich, deputy chief of the Nazi SS. No matter: Each viewer will manufacture a unique narrative.  

Works from the 1990s

Paintings from the 1990s are grouped in Wexner’s second large gallery. “Tracing,” a work in Tuymans’ first U.S exhibition, in 1994, depicts a dull-colored, stylized bouquet of flowers with a folk-art feel. Wall text reveals that the floral pattern was copied from an embroidered fabric that once covered a chair in which a person was murdered—information that radically alters how we read the image. Whether the anecdote is true or not, Tuymans’ lesson is that decontextualized images can generate myriad, even contradictory meanings. Herein is Tuymans’ ultimate caveat about representation itself, painting and mass media imagery included.

Similarly, “Der diagnostische Blick  (The Diagnostic View) I-X,” 1992, a series of paintings based on photographs from a diagnostic medical manual, reduces humans to body parts. Cropped images of a cancerous breast, or legs ravished by skin cancer, become almost abstracted by Tuymans’ wet-on-wet painting technique. How does this species of decontextualization, the pedagogical medical image, affect the way doctors “frame” and treat their patients?

By the mid-1990s, though Tuymans was still preoccupied with Nazi Germany, he also aimed his crosshairs at the misdeeds of other nations, including the U.S. and his own country. The bespectacled face smiling at us in “Heritage VI,” 1996, looks like a grandfatherly neighbor, until we’re told he’s based on a photo of Joseph Milteer, a right-wing extremist and Klansman who was implicated in a plot to assassinate J.F.K.

Recent Works

At the turn of the century, Tuymans tackled Beligium’s dirty past with significantly larger canvases and a slightly more colorful palette.  “Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man,” a series of ten paintings that debuted at the 2001 Venice Biennale, grapples with Belgian colonial rule in the Congo and the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister after the country gained independence. The suite lays bare the machinery of colonial power and its long lasting effects, and as such can be be viewed as a primer on post-colonialism. The Mwana Kitoko of the exhibition’s title, the Belgian king, is the subject of a full-length portrait. The white king in his glaringly white military uniform steps off the royal jet and onto his colonial territory. The image is bleached like a Polaroid left in the sun, or as if shimmering heat or glaring sun were disintergating the image from the viewer’s vantage point.  Mwana’s face is obscured; his eyes are covered with sunglasses. Perhaps this man has no identity, other than as a symbol of Belgian power. By contrast, Lumumba, who will replace him, is depicted  in a more intimate head-and-shoulder portrait almost looking straight at the viewer.  

Tuymans also examines the Bush administration and 9/11 in “Proper,” 2005, a series of  six paintings. In “Secretary of State,” a close-cropped image of Condoleeza Rice’s infamous scowl confronts the viewer, her head blown up to such size that she becomes like a colossal face on Mount Rushmore, part of the landscape; the canvas’ horizontal orientation reinforces the sensation. But she’s also sticking her face in yours, obscuring everything behind her. She’s the Presidential guard dog. You must listen to her; you don’t need to see for yourself. Once again, Tuymans illustrates that power is maintained through the framing, obfuscation and deliberate omission of information, be it visual or textual. Perhaps he is postmodernism’s history painter. His work is about the unreliability of perception and memory; it underscores the  limitations of representation itself (painting included); context is everything,  meaning is always incomplete and subjective; and he exposes the mechanisms that produce myth and even misinformation.

Tuymans’ biography, well-tended by the artist himself, reenacts the crisis of faith of many artists who must daily battle the mass media’s onslaught of images and the challenges of the creative process. Tuymans copped to his medium’s inadequacies, found a way to get past what could have been the paralyzing epiphany that he’ll likely never create anything original, and found a way for it to be both relevant and critique its competitor. 

Though Tuymans claims to produce his work in one day, it is what precedes the day of painting that is so time-consuming. Tuymans looks and thinks about a subject for who knows how long, and it is this process, distilled in his work, that makes it so compelling. For anyone interested in contemporary painting, Tuymans deserves an equally long look. You will be captivated, but not by facile beauty.

To view more of Tuymans' work from the exhibit, view the gallery here. For more information, visit the Wexner Center for the Arts. Luc Tuymans is on view through January 3, 2010.