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Luc Tuymans and the Use Value of Irony
Presented At College Art Association Conference, 2007
Abstract
It is my contention that the work of the Belgian (Flemish) painter Luc Tuymans, arguably the most influential contemporary painter after Gerhard Richter (witness his many imitators), while highly inventive and mysteriously sophisticated, negotiates a complex and sometimes compromising relationship between the banal and the sublime, between the elusive and the intricately simple; and is an example of an instrumental and politicized engagement of irony as a tactical method designed to elevate the sublime into a new political light. Tuymans is an extraordinary painter who has discovered a language of painting that combines an economical and swift informalism with an insightful and revelatory investigation of our collective subconscious, all within an emotionally-detached and cool ironic play of painting styles. While his work carries with it many elements of the psycho-political gadfly (see “The Secretary of State”, 2006, a painting that captures the hideous and duplicitous smile of Condoleeza Rice) one would be hard-pressed to ever be “moved” by his paintings. This engagement between the political/ethical tradition of painting that dates back to the likes of Goya, David, and Picasso and the cool pseudo-journalistic detachment of Warhol, in other words, between ethos and pathos, or, between ground and surface, makes Tuymans a unique figure in painting today.
My paper would demonstrate this strange ambiguity of Tuymans’s work and how it represents both sides of contemporary art’s ethos/pathos dichotomy while toying with irony as quasi-political and quasi-aesthetic strategy, Tuymans’s political engagement, while cool and lucid, one might say, even cagey, resonates with psycho-social aftershocks upon careful examination of the subject matter and the perception of the staying power of his best paintings. This lucid detachment, reflected in a speedily-executed but often highly disciplined brushwork, a drab (usually gray and very pale) and diluted (like Belgian weather) palette, and an extraordinary ability to bring |
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even the most mundane objects (wrapping paper, pillows, oranges) to resonate with an economy of painterly means, makes Tuymans today’s foremost practitioner of informal formalism (“bad” or “sloppy,” painting). While at times lacking in rigor and other times exquisite, his painting affirms an informality that recalls Matisse and is yet still tied to the cloudiness of the Belgian conscience and climate, not to mention its identity (and the tension between Flemish (Dutch) and Walloon (French) cultures). This loose and weathered “informality” of the work, in contrast to the usual hard-edged and over-wrought commercialized designy painting that characterizes much of today’s “professional” painters, makes Tuymans’s work radical in both a historical and stylistic sense. Tuymans’s soft and almost improvisational play of paint, the vast range of tints (the addition of various proportions of white to another color), dilution ratios, and textures keeps his work rooted in a direct, seemingly guileless, and uncanny material relationship to painting that dates back to Rembrandt’s ultra-materialist handling of paint, and is the key to his tactical ironic style because it refuses to compete with the gloss and slickness of the department store window display aesthetic that dominates galleries in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris and other art centers.
Download complete Paper HERE
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