Luc Tuymans

Wako Works of Art, Tokyo
Private Collection, Hiroshima
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Tokyo, Wako Works of Art, Luc Tuymans: Undetermined, February - March 2000, illustrated in color on the cover
Tokyo, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Luc Tuymans: Sincerely, October - December 2000
Osaka, National Museum of Art, Essential Painting, October - December 2006

Ulrich Loock, Juan Vicente Aliaga, Nancy Spector and Hans Rudolf Reust, Luc Tuymans, London, 2003, p. 160, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. In the whitish pigment in the upper right quadrant, the very faint linear pattern is either pentimenti or brush marks from process. Under UV light, there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is mounted to a wood backing painted white and was not removed for inspection. The work is framed in a dark blonde wood frame with Plexiglas.
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The Room from 2000 by Luc Tuymans is, in every respect, inimitable. Painted during a time of growing international recognition for this influential painter and just one year before his work filled the Belgian Pavilion at the 49^th Venice Biennale, The Room is exemplary of the artist's fondness for negotiating the disconnect between the fleetingness of reality and the fixity of the painted image. The present work presents a scene that is at once animated and still: on the one hand, the cozy setting depicted in The Room - there are candles, personal items and a welcoming chair - offers the viewer a sense of familiarity and refuge. On the other hand, action pervades the scene as the displaced chair suggests it was only just vacated. In essence, this abandoned scene provokes the viewer, begging a slew of questions: Who, after all, occupies this room? Will he or she - or they - be returning, and if so, when? Art historian Gerrit Vermeiren explains Tuymans's predilection for painting such scenes by writing, "The moment that Tuymans chooses to portray seems usually to be a moment before or, particularly, after the event. The real subject, rather than portrayed directly, is always implied within a system of cinematic triggers." (Gerrit Vermeiren, Luc Tuymans: I don't get it, Ghent, 2007, p. 24).

A filmic reading of The Room in particular is provoked not only by the absent figure, but also by the uncertainty of this setting. Its homely décor and presumably useful objects suggest the scene is one of a living room, or perhaps more aptly, of a studio. Indeed, the landscape painting hanging in the background, as well as the second artwork behind the table, imply this space could, in fact, belong to the artist. The scene thus further unfolds: the objects are revealed to be painter's tools and the missing person is re-imagined as Tuymans himself.

As curator and critic Nancy Spector puts it, "The absence of people from many of Tuymans's paintings... does not preclude the presence of distinct anthropomorphic undertones. According to Tuymans, the still life and the portrait are utterly interchangeable; depictions of people and things can tell the same story, as long as the tone is equally hushed, the perspective equally skewed, the cropping equally extreme." (Ulrich Loock, et. al., Luc Tuymans, London, 2003, p. 97). In The Room, the canvas to the far right of the composition is depicted only partially, and the table, too, is clipped. This dramatic cropping of the painting is a typical effect of Tuymans's method, which depends on painting from source materials such as photographs, films, television and even mental images.

Regardless of the source of the present work, its formal composition was anticipated in Tuymans's 1993 painting Silent Music (Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), itself a depiction of a vacant bedroom. In both works a chair and table set is depicted - the two chairs, strikingly, are oversized in relation to their corresponding tables. In The Room, meanwhile, the distance between the cabinet and the table is indiscernible; in Silent Music also, perspective is skewed as an impossibly large cupboard looms in the background. As such, the two works are delicately infused with contradictory sensations of fullness and emptiness. In the same way that The Room projects a sense of absence, Silent Music is understood to exude loneliness in spite of its crowded furnishings. The two paintings, however, differ significantly in regard to color palette and lighting. Whereas soft hues of blue, tan and muted green in The Room conjure serenity and wellbeing, the harshness of black outlines and an incongruous color palette of children's blue and pink in Silent Music suggest repression and violence, not unlike the politically aware works of much of Tuymans's oeuvre.

Irrespective of the subject matter, size or palette of a specific painting, Tuymans renders each work - the present piece included - within the span of a single day. He says, "The act of painting itself is so concentrated. There is a sort of ease when I work, a directness... It's about truly focusing, and that is sexually loaded. It's true concentration, true intensity. When I fail to reach that breaking point it is not accurate and never will be. That's why it is very sexual. It's another type of arousal." (Ibid., p. 28). Given this, Tuymans imparts pleasure into even his most ominous paintings, and The Room, for its part, further honors the joy of the medium through its depiction of paintings. This confidence in the painterly medium is one Tuymans defiantly assumed in the latter part of the twentieth century, precisely at the time his contemporaries were keen to deem painting "dead."

Curator Helen Molesworth writes, "Forfeiting the logic of painting's death... permitted Tuymans's divestment from the medium's slow and seemingly inexorable turn toward abstraction and instead activated its specifically narrative qualities." (Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Luc Tuymans, 2009, p. 19).  It is unsurprising that Tuymans should consequently become one of the most admired painters in recent history - work such as The Room is supremely sophisticated, subtly challenging its viewer to envision a story and celebrate its medium.