When he was 18, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans painted a self-portrait that won a prize. Besides some money, he received a book on one of the most famous Belgian painters, James Ensor. Among the reproductions in the book he was dismayed to find an Ensor self-portrait that was, in essence, very similar to his own. "I thought I had made something original," he said, "and then discovered that it was impossible." The experience reinforced his conviction that "all you can do is make an authentic forgery."
Hence his desire to make paintings that seem to have been around for a long time. On occasion he has even provided them with a surface of cracked pigment. His images, as well, are usually taken not directly from life but from other images, or from toys or models - he admires Edward Hopper because, he says, his figures look more like puppets than real people. Like many younger artists, he has never experienced the fine art snobbery about using images at second or third hand, images processed through television, film, newspapers or magazines. It's as if he's actually happier dealing with a copy of a copy of a copy. It's another way of staying at several removes from an "original" subject matter.
Hardly surprising, then, that for the work that makes up his exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, The Passion, he looked not to primary sources but to the celebrated Passion Play at Oberammergau, and (accidentally, he says, rather than by design) to Van Meegeren's Vermeer forgeries, for his imagery. His Christ is a Charlton Heston lookalike, taken from a 1970s magazine photo of a villager who played the part. Equally, his blurred, over-illuminated crucifixion is curiously off-hand, attended by a clutch of indifferent bystanders, and it is hard to ignore a flat band of paint that runs incongruously across the top of the image, making it look as if it's just a magazine photograph.
He also points out that this line puts a stop to any suggestion of transcendence. Equally, he says, the light that illuminates these images is not celestial, not natural, it is the light of the photographic flash gun, the floodlight, the battery powered torch. Irony, distance, detachment, scepticism, caution: these are the qualities that come to mind. As he makes clear, he is not a believer, and he was concerned to treat the Passion in "a pretty banal, somewhat ironic way", but - and this is in a way the central paradox of his art - out of a real fascination with the ideas of belief and sacrifice at its heart, though "it's not necessarily a statement about what religion is or could be."
Tuymans is only in his early forties, but in his relatively short career to date, he has become an exceptionally influential presence internationally. He is the dominant, if by no means the only, instigator of a vogue for quirky, oblique understatement, evident in the work of many, mostly younger painters. Dark, slim, and intense, he is articulate and voluble, a little touchy, responding fiercely to anything with which he disagrees. Under the heading for Artist's Acknowledgments in a Phaidon book about him, he thanks someone for "being so accommodating and gentle in opposition to my aggressive nature," and he does seem combative and quick-tempered.
He studied painting, and later art history, in Brussels, and he has been based in Antwerp for the last 20 years or so, working in the same studio throughout that time. In the early 1980s he experimented with film before returning to painting. He reports that not a single visitor turned up to see his first exhibition, in 1985, in a venue he had hired in Ostend. Three years passed before his next solo show, but from that point on he has had a fairly hectic schedule and attracted a great deal of critical and commercial attention.
One of the paintings in The Passion could be described as a typical Tuymans. It is called Mirror and it depicts, he says, a mirror viewed from an angle which means that you see absolutely nothing, just blank, indecipherable spaces. In commentaries on his work, his liking for such insignificant details, for the spaces between things, are interpreted as an antidote to the Modernist dream of a grand, all-encompassing style. Instead of big paintings of everything, you might say, Tuymans makes little paintings of nothing - or of what seems at first glance to be so inconsequential as to be nothing.
The titles and conceptual frameworks of his paintings are important constituents. This is both a strength and a potential weakness. It's a strength because it enables him to sneak up on major subjects like the Passion without banging a drum. But sometimes the image is so minimal, and the interpretative scaffolding so elaborate that the physical substance of the artwork fades into insignificance - something that he himself wouldn't necessarily see as a failing or a drawback. He has also made much work that requires no exegesis at all. Prosaic images, like Bloodstains, which simply depicts drops of blood on a surface, or the stuffed doll torso of Body pack quite a punch.
The casual, throwaway appearance of some of his paintings is calculated in the sense that they are not facile products. He points out that, while each work is painted in a single day, it can take a long time to get to that one day. Beforehand, he saturates himself in a subject, until he is exhausted and fed up with it, until he has, as he puts it, visually killed it completely. It is at that point that he is ready to make the painting.
His pictures can look as if they have been painted nervously and awkwardly. They seem drained of colour and form, flattened and dispirited, delicate and convalescent. In their extreme quirkiness they suggest a neurotic sensibility, sometimes naivety, but also a dark, deadpan humour. When an interviewer inquired about his reported comments that he was terrified by the film Snow White as a child he rather ingeniously replied: "It's the idea of animation which is terrifying."
WHILE the paintings have a detached, remote quality, a studied absence of drama, there is also a peculiar intensity to their blankness. The images and the subjects can be banal, but they usually possess or, by virtue of context or title, are given a twist that makes them sinister, that creates unease in the viewer. "The idea of fear is pretty much embedded in my personality. Constant fear and constant uneasiness," he has been quoted as saying in relation to this quality in his work. Gas Chamber, for example, is a warm, blank space with some fixtures and fittings. There's nothing unpleasant or ominous about it until you discover its title - as a prospective German buyer did, and immediately became, as Tuymans reported, "blocked and petrified." The hitherto nice painting had become something problematic, even horrible, through its association with atrocity. I had decided not to ask him the standard question about what he thought about the current position of painting in the art world, but, completely unprompted, he came around to it anyway. "Painting," he said, "provides a pattern for the arts." Even artists whose work seems antithetical to painting, he elaborated, like Cindy Sherman, essentially see the world through painting, a point similar to the late Patrick Heron's argument that the real function of painting in culture is to teach us how to see things.
"Painting today cannot afford to be stupid. It cannot afford to be only gesture, for example," Tuymans went on. "It cannot be any one thing, it must be divided, diverse. It is more at the periphery of art activity, which is actually a good place to be. But then painting has never been naive, because it's always been forced to think as a medium. Still no artist can escape it. It's very striking to me that other artists never ask me why I paint. When I meet Douglas Gordon (who works with film) he doesn't try to persuade me that painting is irrelevant. We talk about art. But you know," and here he allows himself the merest flicker of a smile, "every curator and critic I meet asks me why I am still painting."
He doesn't answer their question, but his work does provide an answer. He paints, it would seem, in a bid to formulate a visual language that takes into account the crowded, compromised environment of contemporary culture, an environment characterised by the ubiquitous presence of dense interwoven layers of images and ideas, by the instantaneous presence of all of history, by profound moral uncertainty and frenetic consumerism. He does so, not by claiming any pure, antecedent authority for high art, but by accepting the effective erosion of any such claim, and by working with the doubts, the uncertainties.
Luc Tuymans' exhibition The Passion is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College until May 29th. A lavishly illustrated study of his work is published by Phaidon in their Contemporary Artists series, at £19.95 (UK).
Mic Moroney's article on Smithfield's Traditional Music Centre, Ceol, will appear on Friday's Sound page.
