Delving deeper into the world of Luc Tuymans through his exhibition and his words
In 2019, Palazzo Grassi presented Italy’s first solo exhibition of Luc Tuymans (Mortsel, Belgium, 1958), considered one of the most influential artists on the international scene. The exhibition is entitled ‘La Pelle’ (‘The Skin’) - taken from Curzio Malaparte’s 1949 book.
In 2019, Palazzo Grassi presented Italy’s first solo exhibition of Luc Tuymans (Mortsel, Belgium, 1958), considered one of the most influential artists on the international scene. The exhibition is entitled ‘La Pelle’ (‘The Skin’) - taken from Curzio Malaparte’s 1949 book - used here less in the literal sense, and more in the sense of ‘under the skin’. The exhibition was curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Luc Tuymans, whose goal was to bring to life a pictorial experience that “presents much more powerful content than one could possibly imagine”.
Luc Tuymans dedicated himself to painting as of the mid-1980s and, throughout his entire career, he has contributed to a renaissance of the pictorial medium in contemporary art. His work addresses issues from the past and recent history, but also everyday subjects through a repertoire of images taken from the personal and public spheres - such as the press, television and the Internet - represented through a rarefied light, proffering them to the public in a form designed to arouse a certain degree of discomfort so as to achieve - as the artist himself describes it - an “authentic falsification” of reality.
“The idea for the exhibition came about during the two years I spent working together with Caroline Bourgeois. It is not, strictly speaking, a retrospective, nor is it characterised by any sort of temporal linearity, but there is a site-specific idea underpinning it, establishing a dialogue between the work and the spaces.”
The exhibition features over 80 works, taking visitors on a journey that is focused on a selection of paintings from 1986 to the present day. It starts with iconic pieces from Luc Tuymans’ oeuvre, some of which have been created with an unusual technique capable of producing unexpected visual effects.
“Once I have decided that I want to paint an image, I also understand how I should paint it. Underneath the layer of paint, I have used a substance that causes the canvas to crack before it is supposed to, so that the painting looked as if it had already aged as soon as it was completed, in the 1990s, in an entirely deliberate way.”
The manifesto piece of the exhibition, Twenty Seventeen, is part of the Pinault Collection and, as the artist explains, is not exactly a portrait in the traditional sense, but rather a face projected onto a doll’s face. It is the representation of a gaze that embodies all the incomprehension and shock felt in response to certain political, social and cultural events that took place in 2017, the year when it was made.
“It depicts a woman who seems to be in distress or very upset or frightened, expressing fear but in a voiceless way, almost immobilised in the image.”
The artist likes to play with juxtapositions of colour, as well as with similarities and meanings. Nowhere is this more evident than in the room where Venedig, Indelible Evidence, Issei Sagawa and Candle are displayed: four works from private collections and various museums, but telling very different stories in this exhibition. The artist’s personal memories have intermingled with the history of Venice itself to create new and unusual landscape views in multiple dimensions, but there are also echoes of crime scene photographs, the renewed idea of masks covering the faces of his portraits, and an investigation into the tonalities of the concept of light, an element without which “no painting or image could possibly exist”.
“I never paint on stretched canvas, but rather directly on a piece of canvas nailed to the wall, which is only mounted on a frame once it is complete. As a result, none of my paintings are ever the same size.”
This exhibition, designed in conjunction with the artist himself, is a response to the eighth carte blanche invitation that characterises the major solo projects of the Pinault Collection and, what’s more, also includes a site-specific piece created by Luc Tuymans especially for the spaces of Palazzo Grassi.
In November 2015, the artist featured in an ‘Art Conversation’ at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi in which he dialogued with curator Caroline Bourgeois, as well as critics Marc Donnadieu and Jarrett Earnest, authors of the exhibition catalogue for ‘La Pelle’.