Michaël Borremans may be the greatest living figurative painter. Based in Ghent, Belgium, home to Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s epic altarpiece, “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” (1432), he has subsumed 500 years of painting into his art. Yet his work is informed by history, not mired in it.
“The Acrobats” provides an opportunity — all too rare on this side of the Atlantic — to see the genius of Borremans in the flesh. He renders skin with such intensity that the living, breathing, blood-coursing nature of the human being becomes vividly alive. In “The Witch,” Borremans seems to be teasing the viewer with a knowing contradiction: The left hand — hands being famously difficult to paint — is awkwardly held before the ambiguously gendered figure’s chest to suggest the form of a witch’s broom, while at once being meticulously rendered with sinew, tendon and veins. In “The Double,” the sitter is costumed in a metallic quilted suit, as if offering protection from an immense heat, with a pink-orange glow reflected off its surface. The face glistens: pink in a pink balaclava, eyes slightly closed. But the magma heat also seems to be creeping up and radiating from an underpainted layer on the canvas. Borremans’s paintings all seem to stop at a near-final moment, with just enough of the brush work and layering left observable. As if a solid thing suddenly has emerged from some elusive vaporous material. It’s painterly magic. A major New York museum retrospective is long overdue.