Onder de titel 'La Pelle' (de huid) toont de kunstenaar 80 werken uit de Pinault-collectie, internationale musea en privécollecties van de kunstenaar, van 1986 tot nu. Curator is Caroline Bourgeois. Ook het werk 'Body' uit 1990 uit onze S.M.A.K.-collectie is daar nu te bekijken.
Uit de bezoekersgids:
'In order to make Body, Lucy Tuymans used a paint he knew would change over time so that both the painting and the body represented would age more or less at the same time. Similarly to Superstition, the body is only sketched with a few brown paint strokes against a backdrop of similar creamy colored shades. But the artist has introduced in this single tone, which is a priori dull and banal, an array of subtly colored nuances to give it density and texture. The whole painting oozes disturbing strangeness: the close up leaves out the head and legs and we don’t know whether this torso belongs to a little girl or a doll, whether it’s natural or artificial or living or dead, even though it seems to intensely challenge and question the viewer’s gaze. Similarly to the famous portrait “of Dorian Gray”, this body seems to be dissolving and in a process of devitalization to the point of becoming the shadow of itself in order to let the painting be embodied and vitalized, as expressed in the cracks that run across it. The work can also be seen as an expression of the relationship between a child and her comfort blanket, the transfer object par excellence, which preserves, carries and bears the traces of childhood so that the child can overcome it when she reaches adolescence. We speak of “still life” in painting, but this is almost the portrait of a “still skin”, a sensitive surface, layers of memories and solidified remembrances showing traces of violence or underlying post-traumatic scars. The reality is practically the opposite, but here lies the intentional ambiguity of Luc Tuymans’ works. The source image is indeed that of a naked rag doll, and the two horizontal black bars are in fact two zips through which the body can be stuffed with material in order to gain volume and firmness, in other words flesh and life...' MD
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