Michaël Borremans: The Monkey

Borremans tells me to ask all I want, as long as it’s with the understanding that the work itself gives no definitive answer. “The essence of art is provoking contradiction,” he says. The essence of our conversation may be a provocation as well. Borremans will not confirm it, but something in his artistic tone has shifted. Quite literally, we see him painting in a different light.... We see him twisting perception ... and spinning the levers of represented unease with more urgency. This is a different stance for the artist.*

*Unless otherwise noted, texts throughout this page are excerpted from arts writer Katya Tylevich’s catalogue essay in the new David Zwirner Books publication Michaël Borremans: The Monkey, now available to order.

With the series The Monkey, Borremans creates aesthetic validity through a fixation on repeats and replicas (arche­types and doubles). He treats as “given” the aesthetically illegitimate (figurines and Hollywood cliché) and seems irritated by the placidity of found objects. He tampers with the evidence.

Borremans also comes out swinging at art history’s platitudes, wades into new discourse and allusions, screws with memory and sentimentality, and ironically equates the artist more to a mass­-produced toy than to a god. Appearing five times in this body of work, the painted antique monkey is something of a “self-portrait,” says Borremans, laughing, not unlike that of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s The Monkey Painter (c. 1739/1740).

Borremans creates an imbalance between viewer and subject. He muddies the presupposed allegory of the human figure. Representations of our own image often evoke empathy. But Borremans makes us question whether his images feel anything for us in return. He taps into the power of the metaphorical cold shoulder.

He presents us with familiar and contemporary images of pain, san­itized in deceptive civility and in a time-­honored medium. His work is free from propaganda. He does not have to tell us what it’s about. We feel it.

The artist’s technical composure and mesmerizing aes­thetic seduces us into entering the territory of body bags and sinister rituals. We take his references to indifference and absurdity with our morning tea and sugar. In part, this is because of Borremans’s trademark characters who yield to threat and force so gracefully, without wound and, seemingly, without emotion. In this way, he dismantles our warning systems, and so we step into thoughts we would otherwise like to avoid.

The Monkey in turn confronts Borremans as an artist, too. Imagine him staring into that face for the first time. Even his technique in these portraits is a pivot: the addition of one thin transparent layer on top of another. The shadows give way to the gleam of the monkey’s forehead and top button. “Maybe I just like to paint shiny objects,” he says facetiously. We end there, promising to talk about the land­scapes tomorrow.