Luc Tuymans: L'Orphelin

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has been invited to create an ephemeral work in a rotunda located in the heart of the French painting collections, near the Flemish schools. A former royal residence turned museum, the Louvre is encrusted with decorations, created at all the great moments in its history by the greatest artists. The exceptional intervention by Luc Tuymans, completely unprecedented for the contemporary period, marks the return of the act of painting in and on the walls of the Louvre.

A major artist of our time, Luc Tuymans has never stopped exploring painting, while remaining part of its great tradition. He declares “I don’t want to make art for art’s sake but a painting of History, or rather a painting of memory and trauma”. His painted work has been exhibited in the largest museums and private collections in the world. For this first important achievement in a museum in France, he created in situ a temporary fresco entitled The Orphan.

Composed of four fresco-painted panels, this work assembles three images representing the cleaning of a painter's palette, loaded with pigments. As usual, Tuymans chose images that he has kept, sometimes for years, in his archives. Images from the media or gleaned from the Internet; photographed using a smartphone or an instant camera, they are worked on at length, interpreted, then suddenly restored through a rapid execution, here at the Louvre, directly on the wall.

The Orphan also testifies to the particular role of the museum as a school of vision, an inspiration for artists by artists, a place of copying in academic times and a territory of creation very much alive today. The panels representing the palette being cleaned or cleaned are joined by a fourth image, that of a work painted in 1990 and lost by the artist, entitled The Orphan, which gives its title to the cycle. It represents the back of a doll's head and without attributes, a neck open to view.

In May 2025, this cycle of frescoes will be covered by the repainting of the rotunda, and the room returned to the hanging of the Louvre collections. Located at the heart of the French painting collections of the 17th century, at the junction of the so-called “Sully” and “Richelieu” wings, this room was called “rotonde Valentin," named after the master Valentin de Boulogne whose works it exhibited for a long time. This space, bathed in light and shadow, had also exhibited for years The Four Seasons , the famous cycle by Nicolas Poussin.

The cycle produced by Tuymans is part of the continuity of this reflection on time. This contemporary and more conceptual approach to wall decor plunges the viewer into a temporality which rather recalls that of hanging, of exhibition, of the alienable, of the impermanent. At eye level, as with the easel paintings, the Orphan also offers another experience of painting, direct, frontal, ephemeral.

Learn more at The Louvre.