If you were to wander round the Luc Tuymans exhibition at Tate Modern (until 26 September) without any previous knowledge of the artist (and with a disinclination to read the information panels), you might come away with the impression that here was a rather traditional painter, eclectic as to subject matter, with a distinctively pale, washed-out palette. The portraits, still lifes and occasional landscape would reassure with their pseudo-familiarity. The faded, emotive colours might even seduce aesthetically. You might enjoy what you construed as a fey poetic vein in the artist, or an attractive intimacy of statement. But you would be wrong. Tuymans deals in banality and horror, and his work is about the nature of history and memory. The trouble is, you have to be told this before the work starts to harbour these meanings. This is art which is entirely reliant upon verbal explanation.
There is, for instance, a beguiling vertical triptych in the fourth room of the exhibition, painted in an unusually soft and muddy orange. Tuymans says this is supposed to convey rage (his version of ‘seeing red’, perhaps?), and he has entitled it ‘Embitterment’. Yet I see it as altogether less vehement than that, and really rather pleasing — but then I am responding visually to it, rather than intellectually. No doubt the wrong way to look at it, since Tuymans tells us that it is ‘an emotional self-portrait…showing the inside of the body’. Really? But I still like it.
Alternately pale and poised or drab and depressing, Tuymans’s paintings are mostly small in size and look almost unaccountably good in their temporary Tate setting. This exhibition will no doubt be flooded by the earnest young, for Tuymans (born 1958) is one of the most influential painters of his generation.
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