Tim Marlow TV - Saatchi Gallery online - The Art Newspaper -
One of the most influential painters in the world today, the Belgium based and born art Luc Tuymans, Illegitimate I 1997 whose work always has this sickly feel, there is a kind of suppressed violence. Tim Marlow on ... The New Tate Modern
Exposing the gap between represented image and historical event, Luc Tuymans’s paintings delve into the inner workings of how mythology is created. The reality of Luc Tuymans’s work is almost ‘twee’, pleasing images of a lampshade or leopard-skin rug pass quite comfortably as aesthetic totems; it’s only their cognitive association with the Holocaust, or atrocities of the Belgian Congo, that encapsulates the true banality of evil – the unspeakable horror in a teacup, the monstrous potential of an empty bath. Luc Tuymans’s paintings consciously fall desperately short of the iconic, becoming vestiges posed as counterfeit emblems for that which cannot be conveyed. Saatchi Gallery online
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 ... 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 Art Newspaper article 9th September 2009, ‘Why paintings succeed where words fail’