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.