So I was going to write a little something about the new Luc Tuymans show, “Proper,” at David Zwirner. But I thought instead, I’d post a portion of what kaveri wrote about the show for a class she’s taking in graduate school.

I’m posting it after she gave me her grudging consent. She says that it’s incomplete and needs revision and was dashed off for a class at RISD and certainly not her best work…

“Proper” consists of 10 paintings of enigmatic subject
matter that, thanks to a few key images – a couple
dancing on a ballroom floor emblazoned with the State
Seal of Texas; a portrait of Condoleeza Rice –
collectively read as loosely referring to the current
state of political affairs in America. In this
context, the painting titled “Demolition” – which
depicts a huge cloud of smoke – suggests September 11.
It’s a typical Tuymans work in that it holds back more
than it tells. We don’t know for sure if we are
viewing the routine and innocuous work of a
construction crew or the aftermath of a terrorist
attack. Neither the deadpan, one-word title nor the
image will settle the matter. The smoke filling the
canvas both obliterates and constitutes the imagery of
the painting – a painting which comes extremely close
to literally depicting nothing. This sparseness of
information, this ambiguity in terms of what is
represented and what it means (or how or ever whether
it means) are some of the themes of “Proper” and of
Tuymans’ work in general…

…Elliptical and enigmatic treatment of weighty
historical subject matter has been a consistent part
of Tuymans’ approach from the beginning of his career.
But the history refered to in “Proper” isn’t yet
history—unlike colonialism or the Second World War, it
is transpiring right now. How, then, to deal with
elements of the Tuymans style that we’ve become
accustomed to reading as elegiac? The muted palette
that in previous paintings seemed to derive in part
from their source material in fading old black and
white photos doesn’t make quite as much sense here.
Why not the lurid colors of CNN?

This leads me to wonder whether Tuymans’ vocabulary,
developed initially to deal with history and memory,
is now being applied in a formulaic fashion to a
ripped-from-the-headlines topic, to lesser effect. Can
the same strategy of photo-mediated, emotionally
stifled, weighty topic/weightless representation make
sense all of the time?

This doubt is exacerbated by the larger scale of the
canvases and the heightened elegance and refinement of
the paint handling in “Proper.” In most of Tuymans’
work from the nineties, small scale and a
matter-of-fact, almost machinelike laying-on of paint
contributed to the effectiveness of the work (an
example would be his “Der Diagnostische Blick” series
of portraits, which included only horizontal
brushstrokes.) This deliberate, self-imposed
limitation of means –including the muted palette and
thin paint – was a formal enactment of the limits of
representation that his paintings dealt with
thematically. And, like the eloquence of a novelist
writing in the voice of an inarticulate fictional
character, the clumsiness of those paintings had an
expressive power of its own. Inadequate signs bent under the burden of meaning, of memory, of
history, Tuymans’ best paintings from the nineties
possessed a conceptual rigor and muted emotion that
isn’t quite matched in “Proper.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 6:26 pm and is filed under art.