Even, artist interview by Jason Farago
2015
Looking today at the works of Luc Tuymans, the most important figurative painter to emerge in the last three decades, it's easy to forget just how strange they looked to the art world of the 1980s. Time has made them less unusual, but not less perplexing. His stern, almost banal paintings depict some of the most violent passages of history–Belgian colonialism, the Holocaust, the war in Iraq–with unsettling economy and washed-out colors: grays, ochres and bilious blues and greens. He paints each one in a single day, and almost always draws his imagery from photographs, films, or his own iPhone. (One source image, of a populist Belgian politician, is the subject of an ongoing dispute: the photographer accused him of plagiarism and won substantial damages, though Tuymans is appealing.)
Tuyman's office lies near the port of Antwerp–his studio is a short walk away, hiding in a courtyard. On the day we meet he wears all black, a little white paint speckling one of his trouser legs. He lights cigarettes with the regularity of a metronome. We speak about Flemish art history, the meaning of novelty, and the unpromising future of Europe, and though he speaks boldly he isn't ever careless: his words are as precise as his paintings are murky.