Exhibition

Michaël Borremans: The Monkey

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Past

June 6—July 26, 2024

Opening Reception

Thursday, June 6, 6–8 PM

Location

London

24 Grafton Street

London

David Zwirner is pleased to announce The Monkey, an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, taking place at the gallery’s London location. In this new body of work, Borremans continues to explore surface and artifice in his careful consideration of mise-en-scène, combining technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. The Monkey follows the April 2024 opening of Borremans’s solo exhibition The Promise at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, as well as his 2022 solo exhibition The Acrobat at David Zwirner, New York. This presentation of intimately scaled paintings in London expands on the themes and modes seen in The Acrobat—a show much lauded by critics including John Vincler of The New York Times, who stated that Borremans “may be the greatest living figurative painter.”

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Michaël Borremans, 2024. Photo by Lukas Wassmann

“I try to reflect on life, on humanity, and on contemporary issues, but with the tools that are suitable for me. I like to reflect on contemporary worlds through a historical view.... And I try to relate in terms of the visuals of today and the visuals of yesterday, because they are still present. Wherever you go, where you see culture, you see traces of the past.”

—Michaël Borremans in conversation with Luca Guadagnino, Interview, April 2024

Installation view, Michaël Borremans: The Monkey, David Zwirner, London, 2024

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.

Michaël Borremans, The Monkey, 2023 (detail)

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).

Jean-Baptiste Chardin, The Monkey Painter, 1739–1740 (detail). Collection of Musée du Louvre, Paris

Borremans often tips his hat to Chardin: not so much from a sense of kinship toward the French painter’s compositions and technique (though, no complaints there); rather, it is from a delight in the attitude of his works. Chardin argued that one must paint with feeling, not color. Oftentimes, that feeling spanned exaggerated melancholy and wryness. It was a soft punch, the visual equivalent of a bon mot.

That certainly checks out for Borremans. The artist loves a dry laugh mixed with the somber medium of oil on canvas. In The Monkey, however, the joke comes wrapped in razor blades. This body of work feels sharp and dangerous. The laugh more acidic.

Michaël Borremans, The Glaze, 2007

Michaël Borremans, The Visitor, 2013

Michaël Borremans, Black Mould/The Badger's Song, 2015

“I do have a lot of baggage from art history in Western culture, but I try not to let it weigh down my work....”

“Because you want your work to be free from direct in­fluence?” I ask.

“Because I don’t want my work to lose its sense of humor,” he answers. “I want to have a sense of flight while working. And I don’t want to think about art while making it. History, anthropology, science, and religion—anything developed by human culture—is the food.”

“Besides,” he says, “these antique figurines are largely influenced by rococo aesthetics”—and the figurines have appeared in his work before.... In the generic, he says, the viewer can find something universal.

“[The romantic attitude is] one level in my work that is significant and important to me. That’s why a portrait of mine can be perceived as a landscape, because it also appeals to the subconscious. The work is never literal, it can never be perceived that way.”

—Michaël Borremans in conversation with Julian Taffel, Marfa Journal, 2024

Installation view, Michaël Borremans: The Monkey, David Zwirner, London, 2024

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.

Michaël Borremans, The Spaceman, 2023 (detail)

Michaël Borremans, The Spaceman, 2023 (detail)

 

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.

Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989 (detail). Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Still from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, 2001

The cowboy’s costume is significant for its repeated use in storytelling, art, and film, and for the shorthand we ascribe to it. It brings numerous adjectives up the throat, not unlike acid reflux. This seems deliberate. A misdirec­tion. Everything else about the work is deliberate, after all: the technical approach, which is measured and precise; the controlled and static subject; even the setting, or absence of one. The cowboy appears site­-specific to a box or a dark room, and not at all free to roam.

The work is an open target for the symbolism we hurl at it. Go ahead, the painting taunts: Say this is a work about childhood, machismo, the individual, or memory. Perhaps say something that sounds familiar, quote someone, use a found sentence, or draw on a personal flashback. Try to say something of value. Say it without repetition or cliché. Say something we haven’t heard before.

Michaël Borremans, The Talent, 2023 (detail)

“I play with the conventions of painting as a medium and the conventions of imagery in Western culture. I question it by making unexpected associations within the image, which are very subtle sometimes, and that provokes an interesting situation in how you perceive the work.”

—Michaël Borremans

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656 (detail). Collection of Museo del Prado, Madrid

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Collection of Courtauld Gallery, London

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964 (detail). Private collection

Stepping back from The Monkey series for just a moment, let’s scan the vast conversation and criticism Borremans’s oeuvre has generated over the past two decades. A survey of writing about Borremans’s work turns up refrains and their immediate rebuttals. There is great veneration for his labor-­intensive technique and for the weight of his paintings. But Borremans is also known for levity. He paints as if exas­perated by the existence of gravity. He has great compassion for the sacred and liturgical, for the uncanny, for Velázquez’s light and drama ... for Manet’s briskness and emotion ... and for Francis Bacon’s interiority. He holds equal affinity for the punch line and the non sequitur, for the profane and the unholy. Borremans transcends any one way of painting or being.

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.

David Zwirner Books

Michaël Borremans: The Monkey

Interested in works by Michaël Borremans?