Japanese cannibals and German executions: Luc Tuymans goes over to the dark side
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Version 0 of 1. Luc Tuymans is best known for his washed and bleached-out canvases, so one huge work in a new show represents a real departure for one of Europe’s most influential painters: it is incredibly dark. The painting is literally dark, in that it is a night-time scene, and metaphorically dark – it shows a group of people moments before they are shot. “It is a one-off ... something different,” he said of the painting, called The Shore, which is based on a scene from a best-forgotten 1968 British film called A Twist of Sand. In the gloom are a German submarine crew about to be executed – but Tuymans said it could easily be read in a different way. “It has a very strange feel at the moment because of the idea of Isis and execution. If you put Arabic letters on top of it, it would immediately resonate in a different way.” Tuymans said he had been striving to make a “really dark” picture for some time, and was increasingly influenced by Goya and his Black Paintings. The painting is one of several new works going on display for the first time at the David Zwirner gallery in London. Tuymans has intentionally made the first floor of the show disquieting for the visitor: beside The Shore is the third painting he has made of a Japanese cannibalistic killer called Issei Sagawa, who these days is a minor celebrity in his home country. The new painting depicts Sagawa as some sort of horror-movie monster, in a mask and tropical helmet. Tuymans always paints from pre-existing imagery. Earlier in his career he might have used magazine pictures or TV footage, while now he regularly uses pictures he has taken with his iPhone. That is the case on the ground floor of the gallery, with three portraits copied from Henry Raeburn works of 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment figures. Tuymans saw the portraits on a visit to Edinburgh, photographed them, then rephotographed the prints to zoom in on the subjects’ faces. Tuymans said he was an admirer of Raeburn, one of Scotland’s most significant portrait painters, and an artist he first encountered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. “Raeburn had an exactitude. He didn’t draw, he just painted like Caravaggio did; there is an urgency to it. Also it’s Calvinistic, it’s not like Hogarth, it’s really dry. That’s what I like about it.” Related: Why Belgium's plagiarism verdict on Luc Tuymans is beyond parody Tuymans’s appropriation of found imagery is central to his practice, although it has landed him in trouble in Belgium this month. A civil court found him guilty of plagiarism after he used a newspaper photograph by Katrijn Van Giel to paint the politician Jean-Marie Dedecker. A fine of €500,000 (£373,000) will be imposed if he makes any further reproductions of Van Giel’s photographs. Tuymans has said he plans to appeal. Tuymans, who had a mid-career retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004, has stuck with figurative painting, even when it was far from fashionable, and remains a hugely influential artist. “It is something I can do, it is like riding a bicycle, and it still fascinates me,” he said. “If it didn’t fascinate me, I wouldn’t do it. The pleasure has to be there, because pleasure and talent go hand in hand.” He said he is happy to be considered influential, but joked: “I would not advise anybody to paint like me because that would be utterly stupid.” • Luc Tuymans: The Shore is at David Zwirner Gallery, London, to 2 April. |