7/15/2023 0 Comments Realism artifactIt is as if a painting by Kandinsky has collided head-on with an abstract design by Moholy-Nagy or Malevich. Incorporating and combining pre-existing architectural plans and designs, Mehretu’s paintings suggest fantastical new maps that appear to represent both space and time. Behind the calligraphic swooshes and monochromatic geometric forms – that appear to swirl around as if caught in some mysterious vortex – lies an elaborate linear structure. But where is Lumumba’s gaze directed in Tuymans’s portrait? It is not directly at the viewer but somewhere offside – adrift, detached, alienated and subtly disorientating.Ī densely layered kaleidoscopic mass of colour explodes across the canvas surface. This method perhaps mirrors the selective memory of Belgium’s colonial past (the Congo was a Belgium colony from 1908 until 1960), and the ensuing silence around the country’s involvement in Lumumba’s assassination in 1961. Tuymans painted Lumumba by recalling a photograph of the leader from memory. In this painting, Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of Congo, is rendered in dusty browns and greys. With a muted and dirty palette, his small paintings – always created in a single day – achieve a shadowy stillness that conjures a lonely, funereal quality. Having once abandoned painting in the early 1980s to study art history and experiment with film, Tuymans returned to the canvas to develop a signature style that seems to throw the slowness of painting against the speed of the photograph, making the labor of the brush visible. Describing his approach as "authentic forgery", Tuymans (b.1958) derives his imagery from other pictures and films so that invention becomes a product of reiteration, referral, recollection and duplication. Luc Tuymans’s paintings levitate above all that they refer to, providing a strange philosophical distance to historical episodes, figures and references. The background is derived from a separate photograph depicting Carrera, a prison island off the coast of Trinidad a country where the artist lived for a short time as a child. The source for the figure in this painting is taken from the cover of the 1972 album Duane Allman: An Anthology, which included a photograph of the band’s bassist sitting in a canoe. Whilst the image of the canoe – a recurring motif in Doig’s paintings – has associations with his upbringing in Canada, the artist recalls that he was first inspired to include it in his work after watching the horror film Friday the 13th. In some areas, the paint has been left to run down the canvas. Is this the place from where the man has travelled? Was he put adrift? The eerie, spectral feeling of the composition is enhanced by the artist’s application of thin washes of paint. The sea around him is impossibly still, the sky a vivid pink. In a canoe sits the ghostly figure of a long-haired, bearded man.
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