Peter Doig at Michael Werner London, 22 Upper Brook Street, September 27 to December 22, 2012
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, October 5 to November 17, 2012

A confluence of events made London the place to see art this October, with the opening of three New York galleries in Mayfair at the same time as Frieze Art Fair. News headlines like “The Americans are coming” and “US art dealers invade London with massive new galleries” sounded almost nervous.

Why it makes market sense for international art dealers to come to London now, and why elegant properties in prime areas are suddenly affordable is easily explained by things like the world economy and where new rich buyers want to live. More interesting is the ascendancy of painting at all these venues.

David Zwirner opened in a five–storey Georgian townhouse with a show of paintings by Luc Tuymans; Michael Werner opened around the corner from the Dorchester with paintings by Peter Doig; and Pace has taken over what was once the Museum of Mankind – behind the Royal Academy – and opened with the late black and grey paintings of Mark Rothko juxtaposed with stark, dark photographs of water by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The juxtaposition took the edge off both artists, and the general mood was altogether too black.

Peter Doig’s exhibition, on the other hand, was filled with strong, perhaps Caribbean, color (the Scottish-Canadian artist left London for Trinidad ten years ago.) As a longtime admirer of Doig, I have to report that the show was a disappointment. Whether the huge price tags on his work have become an inhibition – White Canoe, a fabulous painting from 1990, was sold at auction in 2007 for an extraordinary $11.3 million – or whether Trinidad is not stimulating him, something is missing.

In place of the old vigor, with the visceral use of paint and hint of menace in the subject matter, the work now seems passionless and thin. Poolscapes, colonial cricket pitches, a naked, long-haired figure riding through the sea on horseback, a boat floating past a cave – these may be a real part of Doig’s daily life on the island, but within his paintings these are still in the realm of romantic ideas that don’t seem visually or culturally digested. If– as they seem to be – the figures are self-portraits, there is something too comfortable and too easy about them. In the past, Doig’s palette has been awkward in a good way, as if referring to artificially created color, but the liberal areas of bright orange and yellow in the new paintings just feel fake and noisy.

A delightful, quirky exception is the small canvas, Lion in the Sand (2012). It could be a tricolor flag with aquamarine sea above the humanized, prancing lion and burning red below. Although I was later told that the drawings in the upstairs gallery were not supposed to be part of the exhibition, I was happy to find small, untamed works on paper, some of them sketches for the canvases below, which suggest the old vitality is not entirely lost. (The horseback rider in the sea, however, should have been scotched in both forms.)

There is an odd interaction between the exhibitions of Doig and Luc Tuymans, whose new series of paintings, Allo!, casts an ironic eye on colonialism and the much romanticized story of the painter who went to live on an island. Doig, who has been accused of doing a Gauguin, says he remains an outsider on the island and that his work would be much more romantic and myth-based if he were Trinidadian.

Luc Tuymans arrived late, bleary-eyed and grumpy for his press preview at Zwirmer, and used the occasion to slag off the “fucking Brits” for being “half-hearted Europeans”. He seemed reluctant to talk about his art that day: the quotes that follow were taken from his interview at Frieze Art Fair a week later. But the Belgian painter is viewed with such respect that he can get away with crass behaviour – and he certainly knows how to silence an audience. When questions were invited at the end of the Frieze talk he interjected: “Only intelligent questions please.”

The paintings in the first gallery are a preface to Allo! (a quote from the parrot which inhabited Tuymans’ local bar): washed out and distanced from the viewer as if seen through a fuzz of talcum powder or on a dim TV screen. Quiet as they are, they grab the attention. Peaches (all works 2012), for instance – a pyramid of bleached, sickly green spheres, which look a bit like cabbages and a bit like scoops of ice cream caught under a fluorescent light. Or Technicolor – a bouquet of flowers seen from above, aglow in a murky haze.

The Allo! paintings are based on stills from a 1942 Hollywood film – which is based on Somerset Maugham’s book, “The Moon and Sixpence.” The story of a middle-aged English stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to become an artist in Tahiti, it is in turn a romanticized version of Gauguin’s life. In the closing sequence, the film moves into Technicolor, showing fake, kitschy “Gauguins”, and this becomes the source of Tuymans’ paintings.

With thin washes of scarlet and blue, hints of yellow, smeared edges and areas of canvas left bare as if overexposed, there are a lot more luminous grays in these paintings than color. They are more about the crude technology of early Technicolor, broken down further by being screened on television, photographed and enlarged. The result is paintings that are complex and subtle.

Tuymans photographed the film stills from the screen with his iPhone, catching reflected images of himself at the same time – which add a lurking element of autobiography. A lot, indeed, lurks in these strange, sinister paintings. The nostalgic beauty of floating female figures and Tahitian fabrics; the lonely prowling figure of a man in a hat who watches, cut off from the action; suggestions of a violent interface between primitive and colonial, and the violence in each.

Transparent as these works are – the pencil drawing is left visible and there is no feeling of change or cover up, just loose, light, searching brushstrokes – Tuymans says that for him the first few hours of a painting are an agonizing struggle. He also says that painting is all about time and precision, that a good painting is never finished and that it remains a one-to-one experience. He is a hard act to follow.

The post Each To His Own Tahiti: Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans in London appeared first on artcritical.

The School of Visual Arts launches its Fall 2010 season of lectures with painter and critic Alexi Worth in a talk organized by the School’s BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department.  Worth, who shows his visually witty art-historically referential hybrids of Mannerist painting and cartoonery at DC Moore Gallery. speaks at the School’s 133/141 West 21st Street building, Rooom 101C at 6.30pm Tuesday September 14.  Also up this week at the same venue is a panel titled “Not Nature Poems” with Rackstraw Downes, Brenda Iijima, Joan Richardson and Jonathan Skinner, moderated by Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson, in the first in what is billed as a “quips and cranks” series on poetics in the arts. The panel takes place Thursday, September 16, same time and room as Worth.  Both events are free and open to all.

The National Academy Museum, host with artcritical magazine of The Review Panel, has announced the line-up for this popular series for 2010-11 which takes place despite the overhaul of their premises this season, where most else of their programming in on hold.  The season includes newcomers to the panel Barbara MacAdam, John Perreault, Alexandra Anderson Spivy, Elisabeth Kley, Hilarie Sheets, Eva Diaz, Marjorie Welish, Ariela Budick and Jeffrey Kastner along with returning favorites Stephanie Buhmann, Peter Plagens, Blake Gopnik, Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, Joan Waltemath, David Carrier and Colleen Asper.  As ever, the series is moderated by articritical’s Publisher/Editor David Cohen.  The season launches September 24 when Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch and Andrea K. Scott, all “repeat offenders” on the Review Panel, join Cohen to review Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at the Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman and Joan Synder at Betty Cuningham.  At 1083 Fifth Avenue at 6.45pm.

The New York Studio School lecture series launches October 5 with painter Suzan Frecon, currently exhibiting at David Zwirner Gallery, talking about her work, and sculptor William Tucker addressing thoughts to Matisse Sculpture the next day.  Both talks at 6.30pm and free, but patrons will need to get there early to secure seats for some of the speakers this season who include Michael Taylor on Gorky, David Cohen on Sickert, Hayden Herrera on Frida Kahlo, Renaissance scholar Alexander Nagel on “Two Prophecies of Modern Art,” and of course artists on their own work, including Phong Bui, Karlis Rekevics, Shahzia Sikander, and, on Thursday, November 4, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.

The post Jabber, Jabber, Jabber… appeared first on artcritical.

Think Disney and what most likely comes to mind is a cartoon feature with some combination of the following: Cuddly, instantly recognizable characters; lush, bright color; quick, ingenious animation; and the realization that countless hours of wizardry went into making each magical moment.

The work of Luc Tuymans, the Belgian painter, on the other hand, could be defined as the opposite of the above on every count: His canvases are fuzzy, ambiguous, barely scrutable images rendered in thin, open yet tentative, unfluent brushmarks and washed-out tones that are muted to the point of anemia.

Disney gives the world a tightly-sealed package of seamless joy and clean-cut sentimentality. Mr. Tuymans, from interviews, emerges as an artist intent on cracking open images to disclose their interstices and the complex social and economic forces that manufacture values.

Where Disney offers a tried and tested formula for the masses, Mr. Tuymans is the acquired taste of an intelligentsia. His paintings, obdurately worked from obscure, ephemeral source images, are enigma variations, even though, recently, he has begun to share the snapshots or photocopies from which his images are inflated. The title of a new book of essays on the artist is indicatively subtitled “I don’t get it.”

Now, Mr. Tuymans offers a new body of work on the theme of Disney. None of the familiar characters you might expect are present: No Mickey, Donald, or Pluto. Instead, it is the vicariously experienced attractions of Disneylands of yesteryear — rides through Alice in Wonderland setups, the turtle float from the Main Street Electrical Parade — based on sources of requisite distance, such as a homemade movie of an anonymous family.

And Mr. Tuymans has also tackled the utopian plans and hi-tech researches of Disney the corporation, making work from experiments and half-aborted projects that reflect what the artist sees as Big Brotherish plans for controlling every aspect of people’s entertainment experience. “Epcot” (2007), for instance, which depicts what looks like a spaceship floating on a large neutral ground, is taken from a publicity still for Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, partially realized as a Florida theme park in the 1980s but originally conceived as a living community that recalls the grandiose schemes of such enlightenment figures as Jeremy Bentham and Étienne-Louis Boullée.

Mr. Tuymans’s riffs on Disney are the latest in a series of his shows that take on America: previous bodies of work meditated on imagery of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, while his last show at David Zwirner, in 2005, titled “Proper,” claimed to deal with the “crumbling state” of our political leadership.  The critical focus on the United States by a Belgian (whose own country’s viability is more precarious) might recall the fixation of other European intellectuals on a quasi-mythical America, such as the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. But in contrast to the venom and near-hysteria of the latter’s “Dogville” (2003), Mr. Tuymans’s “Forever: The Management of Magic” offers a much cooler, more enigmatic and open-ended kind of critique.

Indeed, it the accompanying rhetoric of interviews and press releases — the program notes, so to speak — that pinpoints any kind of criticality. Left to their own devices, the paintings induce ambiguous emotional responses that hardly signify in any overt manner the political messages claimed for them.

The paintings represent a significant formal departure for Mr. Tuymans in terms of their size. Some are gigantic, almost mural-scaled, such as “Turtle” (2007), which is 12 by 16 feet. It is often repeated in the literature about Mr. Tuymans (in my on 2005 review of his last New York show in these pages, for instance) that he works “alla prima,” concerned to complete each image in a single session. This , according to his gallery, was never actually the case (although the artist gave indications that it was in interviews) but would certainly be belied by the formidable work required for canvases of this size, which are built up in his characteristically feathery, close-knit brushstrokes.

At whatever speed they are worked, however, the paintings’ affect on the viewer is a strange mix of tempi. On the one hand, they are a slow read. “Turtle,” for instance, with its mass of white blobs against a gray ground, does not register as the animal float from the Electric Parade its title indicates without strained effort and familiarity with the source. Instead, it seems to resemble, at first, an out-of-focus kissing couple. At the same time, the frustrated pace does not compensate with painterly rewards. The ungenerosity of color and the fiddly, noodling brushiness induce a corresponding lethargy on the viewer’s part.

This is not painterliness that cracks open the familiar to expose perceptual treasure. In “Epcot” there is a large patch of steely blue forming a vibrating lozenge on the lower section of the gray ground against which the utopian model floats. Very superficially, it recalls similar patches in late Bonnard paintings. But in Bonnard, even where you cannot verbalize the effect, you sense a formal or psychological value or direction to it, and, correspondingly, that it arises from intense relationship with the subject. In Mr. Tuymans, you are never allowed to forget that the source is banal and secondary. The painterly effects, therefore, are improvised, or else have to do with conveying the vagaries of cheap photographic sources. Painterliness underscores alienation rather than ameliorating it. The emotional result is enervating, not illuminating.

But for a painter taking on false utopias, deconstructing corporate control, and seeking to question assumptions about language and pleasure, this is all as it should be. The more dull and confounding he can be the better for the conceptual credentials of his project.

Taking on Disney, Mr. Tuymans is locking horns with the most successful enthraller of children of all times. In doing so, this quintessential postmodern intellectual among painters recalls an epithet the Surrealist poet André Breton extended to Picasso’s paintings: “tragic toys for adults.”

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 28, 2008 under the heading “Taking Down Disney”

The post Luc Tuymans appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201581395″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

The post November 2005: Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 20, 2005

Luc Tuymans is difficult to like and harder still to ignore. Which is exactly as things should be for an artist who puts alienation at the heart of his enterprise.  He is an artist more concerned to problematize than to delight.

The 47-year-old Belgian is probably the most influential painter of his generation. His blurry, intentionally bland and off-hand pictures are so widely imitated in art schools, for instance, that the critic Jerry Saltz issued a call for a four year moritorium on the use of photographs as sources for painting, to be called “the Tuymans Rule” (“The Richter Resolution” was an alternative title.)  His hauntingly vacant images are compelling yet elusive to the point of seeming wilfully obtuse. They put you in a mood (a blue one, generally), but you come away from them with a generalized sensation rather than specific visual memories. Although they often focus on singular objects or events, they are somehow too tricky and shadowy to submit to memorability.

Mr. Tuymans’s sixth solo exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, typically, has a stated theme that is as enigmatic as any of the individual images: “Proper” purports to deal with “the crumbling state” of American current affairs. But the intriguingly eclectic range of images — a portrait of Condoleeza Rice, a still life of a timing device, some ballroom dancing scenes — hardly adds up to a Dogville-esque indictment of Uncle Sam.

Mr. Tuymans is, in a way, Postmodernism’s history painter. He tackles loaded political themes — past shows have taken on the Holocaust, Belgian meddling in post-colonial Congo, and the press response to the September 11 attacks — in ways that are teasingly tangential. If history is usually told from the point of view of a highly intellectual fly on the wall, Mr. Tuymans offers, instead, the take of a half-asleep couch potato, subliminally aware of TV or newspaper images as he mulls over personal, prosaic concerns. It is history as experienced by the numbed, the apathetic, the befuddled.

There is virtually no image, beyond the Rice portrait, which is identifiable as a significant news source in this show, except perhaps “Demolition” (2005), a cropped study of a building coming down in thick,billowing dust, which because of the implied scale with the tiny lamppost at the base might put the viewer in mind of the World Trade Center.  Instead, “Proper” consists of seemingly neutral—and, if “telling,” bewilderingly so—details like a couple ballroom dancing on a marble floor sporting the state seal of Texas, or a vertiginous perspective of a timing device on a bare wall.

He is a kind of still-life history painter because what he dwells on are not so much events in themselves as images of them, or around them  This is not to say that he is a photorealist; rather he is trying to find through paint a metaphorical equivalent of the enervating ubiquity of the photographic image.

This is not new, of course: In his affection for blur, as Mr. Saltz realised, Mr. Tuymans recalls Gerhard Richter, who has made photo smudge a trademark of his “capitalist realism,” and Walter Richard Sickert, whose uses and abuses of the photograph were complex and varied. The latter, like his mentor Degas, appealed to a fresh disinterestedness, but in his innovative late work Sickert found in photography a potent means to convey the simultaneous aloofness and intimacy in the mass audience’s relationship with celebrities.

Mr. Tuymans’s “Mwana Kitoko” (2000) a portrait of a colonial officialin dress uniform is reminiscent of Sickert’s portrait of the ill-fated King Edward VIII. And the “The Secretary of State” (2005) relates to innumerable portraits from photographs by Sickert, as they do to the self-consciously Sickertian modern history painter R.B. Kitaj’s deliciously subversive monochrome portrait of Unity Mitford.

The apparent inspiration for Mr. Tuymans’s Rice portrait was the reported characterization by a Belgian politician of Ms. Rice as “strong, not unpretty.” Like Mr. Kitaj’s portrait of the cute young fascist, “The Secretary of State” evokes an erotic ambiguity: A presumably left-leaningpainter is turned on by a strong, not unpretty woman who personifies policies he abhors. Sexuality complicates political thinking the way painting complicates a straightforward snapshot. The painting has a simultaneous immediacy and otherness that comes from an empirical rendering in blown-up scale of the surface data of a photograph, which itself is not a posed, official portrait but a frozen moment of reportage.

The pervasive unease in Mr. Tuymans’s work amounts to a sublimated violence. His imagery deals with conflicts and problems obliquely: Seemingly intent on capturing the banality of evil rather than its drama, his strategy is the antithesis of the Renaissance theorist Alberti’s definition of *istoria*, which is to capture the most telling moment or episode that encapsulates the tale, and the moral lesson. Very little in the current show, however, seems explicitly sinister beyond the anemic colors, shaky cropping and skewed perspectives of trees in a park, in “The Parc,” or the top of a four-poster bed, in “Courtesy,” (both 2005

In his equation of banality and violence, Mr. Tuymans represents an update of Francis Bacon, not in the spasmic contortions of blood and guts that constitute Bacon’s foreground figures, but in the equally disturbing blandness of his deadpan backgrounds. Bacon doesn’t just convey violence in paint but commits a certain kind of violence *towards* the medium, which is what Mr. Tuymans does.

One of the strangest aspects of Mr. Tuyman’s project is his strict rule of finishing each painting in a single sitting. This is particularly perverse because *alla prima* painting is usually intended to achieve freshness and spontaneity, whereas Mr. Tuymans has more than lived up to his anti-heroic ideal of the “authentic forgery.” Far from conveying any kind of speed or dashed-off painterliness, his surfaces have a flat, matter-of-fact delivery that is usually associated with a slow, deliberate hand. But they do have a sense of belligerent unfinish and of apathetic awkwardnesses. It is as if they wanted to convey as much alienation and unease in the way they are made as in the way they will be received.

The post Luc Tuymans: Proper appeared first on artcritical.