Thursday, September 21, 2006

Luc Tuymans


THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER 

Owen Drolet
Tsjombe, 2000. Oil on canvas, 73 x 108 cm.
Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

LUC TUYMANS,

LIKE his fellow painter Gerhard Richter, utilizes found as well
as self-made photographic imagery, taking
a serious speculative interest in the endlessly intertwined relationships
between all forms of image making, from drawing and photography
to television and cinema, and ultimately to history, memory, and cognition itself.
Tuymans and Richter also share the premise that nothing seen can be believed,
dismantling with haste any old-fashioned notions you might
have had about the possibility of veracity.
But Richter, having come of age in the middle of the last century,
is a modernist at heart and therefore always strictly concerned
with the limitations of his medium.
Photography, however ingrained in his practice, still represents a challenge to

painting or, at the very least, an instrument with which to
further clarify its boundaries, and this is precisely why his technical
virtuosity can have such perverse charm.
Yes, we see that photographs, like other works of art, are composed forms
of rhetoric rather than factual' documents, but mostly he presents
us, over and over again, with dazzling displays of what painting can't do —
like early Frank Stella but figurative.
And the better he paints them, the more stunning the spectacle he creates,
the more poignant his endgame becomes.
Tropical Institute, 2003. Oil on canvas,
156 x 139 cm . Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

With Tuymans we jump from endgame  to postgame wrap-up, a commentary on the
commentary and yet one freed from the
burdens of solipsism. What Richter repeatedly proves to us, Tuymans takes for
granted.
As a former filmmaker, he is clearly at ease with other media and has fully
assimilated their various rhetorical
biases.
Painting has no special place in his world and requires no defending or even
articulating. It is just a quiet
corner of the
densely populated media landscape, one that lies to us as regularly as our
televisions.
These lies and omissions, however, are not examined through the prism of painting's particular
epistemology but rather are
the rhetorical nature of all speech.
Whereas Richter must be proficient and complex in order to show us the precise ways
in which painting (perhaps the oldest
form of complex cultural communication) fails, Tuymans uses a sort of false modesty
to allow us to see again how it can succeed — the
joke being that success and failure in this case are largely the same thing.
That paintings lie has been for Richter a fact of self-defining but glorious
limitation.
In Tuymans' hands it becomes a humble acknowledgement of the medium's wider
relevance as history, memory, and
even ‘media memories' continue to merge in our lives into one big blur.
Dancing, 2003. Oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm
Courtesy of Zeno X, Antwerp.
This is why we shouldn't expect or require an individual masterpiece from Tuymans.
The strength of the paintings is cumulative in effect, which is in keeping with our
media saturated times.
His is a project as much about its conceptual conceits and overriding thematic
concerns as it is about specific paintings.
Consider his work for the 2001 Venice Biennale and its confrontation with the
largely forgotten legacy of Belgian colonialism.
As individual works, the paintings' mysterious and ghostly images of Patrice
Lumumba and the men who colluded in his murder can
easily sink into an unsatisfying non sequitur, but viewed together their meaning
grows in comprehensibility without necessarily
restricting its scope.
It has long been derisively argued by many painters that simply hanging a
painting on a wall constitutes an installation, but Tuymans truly is
an installation artist, working with discrete hand-made props rather than the
usual readymade assemblages.
The result has been a series of exhibitions whose larger, quietly theatrical
dynamics reinforce those found within the individual
canvases as we turn our attention from one untrustworthy image to the next.
First and foremost, however, Tuymans remains a painter of mood.
The canvases are linked not only by their reduced palette of modulated grays
(the unofficial color of memory), but also by their uncanny
sensation of ill-defined dread that turns seemingly mundane circumstances into
enigmatically portentous scenarios.
This strange feeling, so difficult to pinpoint and therefore pleasantly at odds
with the more concept-driven aspects of his project, is
what, over time, has most distinguished the work.
When first encountered, the paintings can seem crude, inarticulate even, until
that unsettling sensation descends like a fog.
Soon, the simplest portrait or commonplace interior feels terribly freighted —
but with what? History? The burdens of representation itself?
So it would seem, though there is no way to know for sure.
All we can be certain of is that something isn't quite right, which leads us as
spectators to Tuyman's larger point: that nothing ever is.



Owen Drolet is a critic and writer based in New York.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Gerhard Richter


All works by herr Richter are online, enough material to spent two days behind your computer!

via art-bbq

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Armen Eloyan



Watch the new show of Armen Eloyan here: http://vernissage.tv/blog/2006/09/07/armen-eloyan-comic-related-paintings-bob-van-orsouw/

I don´t want to guess how he broke two arms at once....
Altough smoking like that ... very classy Armen!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Kristof Kintera new website

www.kristofkintera.com



Finally there´s a website of Kristof Kintera´s work!!!

NEW FIELDS OF ARCHITECTURE: ZAHA HADID


Zaha Hadid, The Peak: Blue Slabs, 1983, acrylic on paper, 111 x 72 1/6". From the project The Peak, Hong Kong, 1982–83.

Zaha Hadid, Habitable Bridge, 1996, London. Model.


Zaha Hadid, Department of Islamic Art, Musée du Louvre, 2005, Paris. Rendering.


Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Opening Martin Eder






Martin Eder opened a show with new works at the Eigen + Art Gallery Berlin.
Although the works weren´t that great in my opinion, it was absolutely an art event and later in the evening the artist played with his trashy night club band in the beautifull ballhaus, wich was absolutely brilliant.
It was amazing how many art victims etc. turned up for just two openings in Auguststrasse.
There was a show at KW and the one above.
KW i don´t have photographs of, sorry.
Art=Hip here in Berlin.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

season of openings has started





Well summervacation is kind of over. The first real opening in months took place at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien yesterday. I had the feeling that this overwelming crowded happening took some ajustments from my part, but it was very nice to see our friends Susanne and Sasha again. The exhibition: How to do things...in the middle of (no)where included work by Sasha (real name Alexander Komarov wich is shown on the photographs, he made a kind of paralel between a prisoner or prison life and the way an artist moves in his studio, i don´t do him justice with this very short description of his work wich includes many more layers but i have to be off and running to the next opening today of Martin Eder wich will probebly feature here tomorrow.