Luc Tuymans: Premonition – ‘the silence before the storm’.Caroline Turner

Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void. The observer should become motionless before the picture,freeze. A kind of picture terror. I show pictures with a direct intention. The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that he or she does not experience directly, but from a distance initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level. Something quite unmistakable then triggers certain emotions, makes certain demands. This can only come about in a certain silence. I mean the silence before the storm.'

Luc TuymansThe art of Belgian Luc Tuymans is about asilence born of fear. His paintings are basedon memories, both personal and collective.They are linked by the hint of somethingbeneath or beyond the surface appearance,intentionally creating in the viewer a sense ofanxiety, triggering the fear which the artist hassaid has absorbed his own mind sincechildhood.

Regarded as one of the most importantyounger contemporary painters, Tuymans'work is deeply informed by European traditionand experience, past and present. This is notsurprising since Belgium has been historicallythe arena for great European power strugglesand its capital, Brussels, is now theadministrative centre of the new EuropeanUnion. Tuymans' art, while intensely personal,is thus at the same time immensely revealingof the post-postwar European generation – thegeneration now in their forties and fifties, freefrom the ideologies and guilt of two world warsbut at the same time charged withresponsibility for a new Europe.Tuymans is not, however, at first sight, anobviously political artist. His paintings for themost part appear to depict the reality ofordinary objects: flowers, still life, landscapesand portraits (that are not quite portraits) andpeople going about everyday concerns. Hismostly small canvasses draw on the traditionsof Flemish realism and surrealism, although heexplicitly denies the latter. There are alsostrong affinities with the world of photographyand the paintings are often based onreproductions. The colours of the paintings arepale, washed out and the images are oftenincomplete or cropped in a mannerreminiscent of film editing. The effect ispsychologically disturbing and disorientating,hinting at an atmosphere of violence; indeedthe artist has referred to the underlyingstructure of violence, both ‘physical anddetached', linking his work, and to his art as a‘metaphor of violence.'

Allusive titles such as

Superstition

Rumour

and

Premonition

for his exhibitions or forindividual works such as

Gas Chamber

(apainting showing an empty white room with adrain in the floor) give a clue as to why his artis so unsettling. Several of the paintings withtitles related to the Holocaust are based onphotos from the concentration camps.Tuymans said with reference to this group ofworks: ‘Western culture, I think, is one of thefew cultures that, in order to progress, hasincorporated destruction. There is a linkbetween annihilation, hygiene, consumerism,production and propaganda. When you thinkabout hygiene sometimes it can be connectedto ethnic cleansing... The final solution issomething hidden.’

Ambiguity is an essentialelement in Tuymans' work: he argues that'when something is not painted it makes itmore meaningful ... There is a sort ofindifference in my paintings which makes themmore violent, because any objects in them areas if erased, cancelled.'

Tuymans' subject matter has focused onepisodes of Flemish history, includingcolonialism in Africa and war time collaborationof Belgians with the Nazis, as well as issues ofcontemporary relevance such as child abuse.He is also concerned about the rise of neoFascism, as exhibited by the ultrarightist andfiercely nationalist Vlaams Blok, which hasrisen in 15 years to be the fourth strongestparty in Belgium, with the slogan ‘our peoplefirst'. All this has encouraged Belgiangovernments to take a lead on moral issues inthe European Union, in an attempt to presenttheir country as 'the earth's conscience.'

It isthus significant that Tuymans was selected torepresent Belgium at the 2001 VeniceBiennale. The exhibition was entitled

Mwana Kitoko

, beautiful boy or beautiful white man,

(the name given to the young King Baudouinby the Congolese). The group of works were inpart a response to the allegation aired in a1999 book by Ludo de Witte that the Belgiangovernment was responsible for the 1961murder of Congo's first prime minister, PatriceLumumba, shortly after independence.

Tuymans' series

Heimat

(1995) is a quitespecific protest against past Fascism andcontemporary neoFascism: he says that hehas ‘tried to rebel against ... this Flemish ideaof a mythical, fixed identity. It is not onlypolitical but cultural as well. It is not aboutdeveloping feelings of melancholy, but about acertain form of deja vu... Nationalism is for melike a mask, unmoveable and hollow…Allforms of nationalism remove the qualities ofreal life and create a uniformity out ofindividual differences.'

His paintings have also touched on Americanissues including slavery, race relations andmulticulturalism. It is impossible not to linkthese works to the fading of the Americandream for Europeans.

Heritage

(1996) wasproduced after the Oklahoma bombingspecifically to explore 'the fortress mentality'resulting from ‘terrorism from within.'

Theworks are of seemingly ordinary images suchas baseball caps. One image shows a manapparently working at some mundane task butin actuality mixing toxic chemicals. In the show

Fortune

(2003), ‘paranoia' is again a theme.The images are similarly innocuous, such as astorefront, with mannequins or a paintballcontest, the latter image drawn from a`gunsand ammo' magazine, but violence is implicit:and in the words of the press release from hisNew York gallery, the mood and psychologicalatmosphere of these paintings ‘heighten theterror that lies within.' It declares that Tuymanshimself states that these are a response to9/11 and that he sees the images of 9/11 as sopowerful because they represent ‘one of themost stunning examples of collective memoryto date.’

Maypole

(2000) was displayed in London inthe Royal Academy exhibition

Apocalypse

Itis one of the most interesting and largest of hisrecent paintings with all the elements of hisstyle. We see a group of men, painted withbarely sufficient detail to suggest that they maybe wearing traditional Bavarian peasantcostume, shorts or

lederhosen

, who areerecting a maypole. There is also what couldbe a group of men in the distance with whatcould be banners. The maypole is a symbol ofancientpagan custom, a symbolic festival in Germanywhen a large tree (and trees and forests arethemselves immensely significant in theGerman psyche), was brought to the villageand decorated with ribbons and evensausages. The figures erecting the maypoleare viewed from the back. And Tuymans hasspoken of the 'fear you have when you seesomeone you don't know from behind.’

The image may be drawn from a reproductionin the Nazi magazine

Signal

Moreover, theNazis expressly used the imagery of themaypole and May Day as part of theirpropaganda. Historians such as GeorgeMosse have shown how they utilised existingfestivals in creating their own mass culture.

In 1933 they held a May Day march, a massrally of workers and the next day replaced theexisting trade unions with a Party organisation.One of the most spectacular Nazi ceremonieswas held in the Lustgarten, Berlin on May Day1936 with a speech by Hitler. As an integralpart of this highly choreographed event, alarge maypole was erected, decorated withswastikas and fir branches. lain Boyd Whyteprovides a fascinating account of this use ofthe maypole as part of Nazi propaganda in

Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators

. Hewrites: ‘What better symbol ... than themaypole, the traditional symbol throughoutNorthern Europe of the end of winter and ofthe reawakening of nature, the focus ofcommunal games and feasts'. Such images hewrites, quoting Saul Friedländer, were asignificant part of the Nazis' ‘kitsch aesthetic':‘On the one side are invoked the tranquilforces of moral values, while on the other sideare flickering the fires of extermination.’

In this context, Tuymans' painting becomesimmensely sinister, inevitably linked to theNazis' use of mystic Teutonic and mediaevallegend, and of symbols drawn from pagantimes. This was particularly true for the SS, thebrotherhood of Nordic men whose masculineethos was fortified by pagan ceremonies,devised by Himmler. This painting, of course,also shows men working together, abrotherhood specifically excluding women andsuggesting the disturbing conformity frequentlyassociated with worlds of men constructed tobe exclusionist for reasons of sex, or ethnicityor ideology. Conformity and complicity with evilon a mass scale is suggested by this painting.In his art Tuymans escapes the trap ofbelieving that art can be an adequateresponse in the face of horror. Instead ofexplicit horror he explores the psychological