via The Art Newspaper:
Why paintings succeed where words failBelgian artist Luc Tuymans talks to us on the eve of exhibitions in Europe, Russia and the US
Luc Tuymans has painted figurative works since the mid 1980s and few artists can be as closely identified with a particular palette. His taste for mouldy pastels, cool greys and dead plaster white make for blurred, obtuse images. This reductive colour scheme represents the elusive nature of history and memory, reflecting the artist’s belief that representation can only be partial and subjective. Loaded political themes are developed in seemingly tangential ways with the Holocaust, Belgium’s controversial role in post-colonial Congo (the influential “Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man” series which was shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale) and the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks given an oblique, fragmented treatment. The diversity of Tuymans’s subject matter, which also encompasses banal paraphernalia such as wallpaper patterns and tea settings, goes hand-in-hand with his use of varied source material drawn from photography, film and television.
The latter features prominently in Tuymans’s first major Russian show at the Red October Chocolate Factory opening this month. Twenty new works, first shown in Brussels earlier this year, examine TV reality shows and the internet. The exhibition, part of the Moscow Biennale, forms part of a Tuymans onslaught this autumn with the artist’s first US retrospective also opening this month at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and an exhibition curated by Tuymans and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opening at Bozar in Brussels.
The Art Newspaper: You once said that your technique is “borne out of a genuine distrust of imagery”? What do you mean?
Luc Tuymans: Well, being part of the television generation means there is already an overload of imagery available. But a lot of the imagery is not lived through but just seen, or you pretend you’ve at least seen certain images, so this implies that there must be a huge amount of distrust towards what you’re looking at. The practice of painting is much more of a habit, rather than being something exquisite. If you try to create a style or refine your painting mode, you just lose the intensity of the moment.
TAN: Much has been made of the need to “decode” your work with viewers looking to your titles for guidance. Do you place too much responsibility on the spectator to unravel your images?
LT: First, you should not underestimate the public and try to be overly didactic which is always the problem with institutions, they force you to produce text after text. For my Tate Modern show [2004], the education department wanted bigger captions but I wanted to make them less visible. There were already explanations outside each gallery but each picture also required texts. We fought over it.
I started out as an artist to demythologise myself by giving the source material I’ve used. Journalists liked this, they knew what to write about me but later on they hated me for it because without any explanations, they couldn’t comment on me. It’s a controversy that really just exists in the media. My ultimate aim is to detach myself completely and look at my works as a spectator would but that is a dream.
TAN: Has your use of the bleached and blurred image reached its limits?
LT: That depends. Some of the later works are actually extremely colourful, like Orchid (2008). The blurriness is actually sharp because, unlike with [Gerhard] Richter, it is not wiped away but just painted. Painting is a very physical object, it’s very difficult to compromise it. It’s difficult to remember it correctly because it’s so complex. But it’s much more detailed than any photograph will ever be. But if you ask people to remember a photograph or painting, they’ll remember the photograph in terms of the size, colours, etc.
TAN: Do you believe art historians will credit your muted palette with creating a new kind of reductive form? Or would you rather they labelled you a post-modern history painter?
LT: Well, neither of those. I would be much happier if academics understood the idea of understatement. Art is not something you have to imply is political. Art is not political, life is political. Isms, such as modernism, post-modernism, etc, they’re just not applicable to the world we live in. The whole practice of painting is about two things: timing and precision.