Luc Tuymans at the Renaissance Society - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

CHICAGO

Belgian artist Luc Tuymans addresses the origins of fear, the one and the other rational and otherwise, in the 22 paintings that made up his first North American museum present to view "Superstition." The Holocaust, child abuse, disease, nature - all work for as fodder to his investigations. As if to remind us that fear is always felt at a transfer from its object, the artist paints from photographs he finds in newspapers and in scientific or historical relation works. Thus, his images have possession of that nebulous territory between individual and collective consciousness.

In Tuymans's small oil-on-canvas paintings the representational and the abstract intertwine. His reductive forms, intentionally naive, are pay backed in flat horizontal strokes painted in chalky pastels that return even as they materialize. Occasionally, as in Research and Child Abuse, his personal tokens are either unrecognizable or too tangentially related to their bring under rule to have much impact. Usually, however, his aim is assured, at times uncanny.

Somewhat in the manner of Christian Boltanski's altars to anonymous children or Gerhard Richter's paintings of slain nurtures Tuymans explores the psychological impact of human atrocities distanced through time. Like Richter, he questions painting's capacity to throw back accurately on these events, throwing into doubt our relationship to what we're looking at.

Many works commit to Nazi Germany. The Walk summons a European street scene, depicting a cluster of pedestrians returned in a bold black with gold-colored swatches. Despite the work's air of tranquility, the fulvid seems intended to refer symbolically to the gold-colored stars Jews were forced to wear as identification beneath the Nazis. Gas Chamber, an without contents room that appears to fade in and without of view, is fraught with a faculty of perception of impending annihilation.

Tuymans also explores the dark side of everyday life in several works that, upon the surface, function as still lifes. In fact, as their elliptical titles remind of they, too, are images of los In Peter a coffee percolator and sum of two units saucepans rest quietly atop a stove, while the absence of the titular character brings a hint of mortality to the display transforming it subtly into a vanitas. a certain number of of the artist's most provocative images involve the material part In Superstition a skeletal figure is overthrow by a large insectlike creature. Diagnostic View VII is a languid image of an isolated breast whose lurid coloring glance ats disease.

Tuymans's work operates as an anxious souvenir, the two a remembrance of things past and a token of an uncertain at hand His macabre poetry exudes serenity and melancholy as it speaks to history, memory and fear, and to that fragile place where they all meet

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