Luc Tuymans

Although flashier artists get most of the public attention, none of them have been as revered in art circles over the past decade as the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. Now a major retrospective show of his paintings is being mounted, although unfortunately it doesn't seem to be coming anywhere near me. I have never seen any of his famous works, and they look like the sort of thing that make a different impression in person, especially since some of them are huge. Because I have to say that in the form of small digital images, nothing I have seen really moves me. Tuymans is said to be concerned with "the ambiguous nature of our relationship to the images we are inundated with," and his response to this seems to be to render everything vague and washed out. Some of his paintings are said to be political, treating issues like Belgian meddling in the post-independence Congo, but few of them have any clear meaning to me. Maybe that's the point; this is Sanford Schwartz in the NY Review:

In the suspicion-laden atmosphere Tuymans creates, we don't need to learn the details behind, say, his 1991 Buttonhole (which shows just that), or his 1998 Orchid (which shows just that), to get a little edgy. We feel we are in the presence of an artist for whom people, places, and things are most fully alive when there is something frightening or culpable about them, or when, disturbingly, he can suggest that a vital aspect about the person or thing we are looking at is being withheld. In an earlier century, his specialty as a painter would surely have been images of hell.

His work is certainly distinctive and interesting, and I would like to see more of it.