2022
Luc Tuymans opens on June 10 his very first solo exhibition in Paris, at David Zwirner. It's a vital questioning, a flow of images that acutely reflect our world. Faced with Luc Tuymans, gesture is immediately language. He mutters a "hello" in his muffled voice, but pronounces the welcome with a broad and rapid gesture of the arm, opening the door of his Antwerp studio, a vast volume under a glass roof where he handles the tube, the brush and the canvas. since 2006 . The paintings for the Zwirner exhibition are leaving, and there reigns in the studio an atmosphere of sorting, of transference, of impending emptiness.
"This exhibition was indeed born out of a void called Eternity. We realized, with historian Timothy Snyder (author of Dark Earth: The Holocaust, and Why It Can Repeat Itself, Of Tyranny, and The way to freedom ) a podcast (in a series produced by David Zwirner, editor's note) around two imperatives: inevitability and eternity. Inevitability is that of neo-liberal progress, the illusory guarantor of democracy ." Voltaire insisted: "It is polite to be gay." At Tuymans, it is discreet to be desperate.