What is Condoleezza Rice to Luc Tuymans

On Tuymans
by Peter Schjeldahl November 14, 2005


What is Condoleezza Rice to Luc Tuymans, the Belgian who, at forty-seven, is the most influential painter of his generation? A small, fuzzy picture of the Secretary of State, glowering, jumps out from the mostly large, fuzzy pictures of decidedly bland subjects now at Zwirner, including a bed canopy, tree trunks, a table setting, and a pair of ballroom dancers performing in the Texas State Capitol rotunda (everything must happen somewhere). It’s like Tuymans, famous for generating poetic intensity while painting about very little, to execute the occasional shocker (a Holocaust gas chamber, once), as if to test the resilience of both his style and his audience. As an artist, Tuymans follows—and improves on—Gerhard Richter in setting epistemological soft traps for viewers, exciting and then confounding interpretive cravings. Growing intellectual frustration overlaps dawning aesthetic pleasure in subtle beauties of extraordinary touch and color. (The pale hues in this show—lavender, plum, peach, citron—are practically aromatic.) In the end, your questions aren’t answered; you just can’t remember them.