“Can you believe this used to be a car park?” Michaël Borremans asks, looking out onto the vast expanse of greenery unfolding before him. It’s hard to picture the daisy-dotted back garden of the painter’s countryside studio covered in a blanket of concrete. And yet, such was the case nine years ago, when Borremans bought the 19th-century property—formerly a baron’s hunting château—as a rural alternative to his primary studio in Ghent. Today, the site is a tableau of serenity. Ancient trees tower in the distance, and horses graze around them. “A lot of the trees are in their last phase, so I planted some new ones,” Borremans says, pointing to a row of young saplings across the lawn. “You have to make sure that future generations have their trees too.”
One of the most acclaimed figurative painters in Europe, Borremans knows a thing or two about creating a legacy. Born in Belgium in 1963, he turned to painting in the mid-1990s after training in graphic arts and a stint working as a photographer and art school teacher. “I already had a certain control over form and light, I just had to teach myself how to work with colors and the materiality of paint,” he says of his transition. “I started off with things that I could master; a hand or face would have been too hard.” It took five years for Borremans to develop his confidence, and find a figurative language that was truly his own. At the time, the city’s Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art had just opened a new offsite space in Ghent, where he landed a solo show in 2000. The founder of the museum acquired a work and interest from galleries and museums around the world followed soon after. Now, he says, “My paintings get snatched away as soon as I finish one.”
Borremans paints people, but not portraits. He depicts anonymous sitters who look somehow absent, their eyes never meeting those of the viewer. Hooded figures stand frozen as if consumed by some mysterious ritualistic force. Children clasp objects—a missile, a dead hare, a bunch of carrots—that could be mistaken for toys, were it not for the gruesome or absurd connotations they carry. Sometimes, his sitters’ features are blown into grotesque proportions. “My work is two things at the same time: It’s holding a mirror onto the complex, often dark facets of human nature while borrowing a very familiar vocabulary of classic portraiture,” Borremans explains. “It’s contradictory and it’s alienating the beholder, and that’s the fun of it.”