呂克‧圖伊曼斯

White Cube, London
Private Collection, Switzerland
Sale: Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, Contemporary Art Part I, 13 November 2003, Lot 5
Charles Saatchi, London
David Zwirner Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Helsinki, Kunsthalle Helsinki, Luc Tuymans: Display, 2003
London, Saatchi Gallery; Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Triumph of Painting, 2005-6, p. 66-7, illustrated in colour
Berlin, Jarla Partilager, Works by Charles Long, Mark Manders, Thomas Schütte and Ian Kiaer with Paintings by Luc Tuymans, 2009

Phaidon Press Ltd., Ed, Luc Tuymans, Second edition, revised and expanded, London 2004, p. 225, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals wear to the bottom left corner tip. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Within follows in the storied tradition of Tuymans' paintings in which the viewer is presented a partial and disquieting narrative. This sombre empty cage exudes an enormous psychological charge, generating a disquieting emotional field. Painted at a time of growing international recognition for this influential painter and during the same year his work filled the Belgian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale, Within belongs to body of work from 2001 entitled ‘The Rumour’, the central motif of which is the pigeon. Unlike its grandiose cousin the dove, traditionally the symbol of peace and redemption, the pigeon is subverted by Tuymans, who presented it within the series as a symbol of filth and degradation, “dirty and disease-ridden, they're a strangely curious mob, a metaphoric stand-in for ourselves…Luc Tuymans offers a chilling ultimate truth about humankind” (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Saatchi Gallery, Luc Tuymans, 2004, n.p.).

Containing no grand gestures, no idealism, Tuymans images are hard to decipher. Through their quietude and understatement “the real subject, rather than portrayed directly, is always implied within a system of cinematic triggers” (Gerrit Vermeiren, Luc Tuymans: I don't get it, Ghent, 2007, p. 24). The wire bars frame the dark canvas of Within veiling and withholding the material reality that lurks within the shadows, exuding a ghostly, bewitching aura. Furthermore it acts as a metaphor for “…the workings and phenomenology of painting in general and for Tuymans’ approach to painting in particular, for the way in which his subjects are always poised on the boundary between concealment and disclosure” (Stephan Berg, Ed., Luc Tuymans. The Arena, Osterfildern-Ruit 2003, p. 13).

Although it is devoid of any explicit reference to the series’ motif, the pigeon, Within demands a narrative, and as curator and critic Nancy Spector puts it, "The absence of people from many of Tuymans' paintings... does not preclude the presence of distinct anthropomorphic undertones. According to Tuymans, the still life and the portrait are utterly interchangeable; depictions of people and things can tell the same story, as long as the tone is equally hushed, the perspective equally skewed, the cropping equally extreme" (Nancy Spector in: Ulrich Loock, et. Al., Luc Tuymans, London, 2003, p. 97). Amid the dark expanse that engulfs the canvas, vertical and horizontal bars and littered shadows create a haunting internal landscape evoking a sense of isolation and confinement. “Most of the elements I paint exist in a sort of vacuum. Most of my pictures depict rooms; everything has been taken out of the image” (the artist cited in: Ibid., Luc Tuymans, London 2003, p. 13), and within Tuymans’ illustrations guilt is interweaved into every canvas; “they evidence previous traumas and transgressions - whether psychological, physical or spiritual - without necessarily revealing the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ of such incident. An index is, thus, the physical mark caused by a specific event: cast shadows for presence” (Ibid., p. 100). In essence, this abandoned scene provokes the viewer, into questioning: who, after all, occupies this cage? Are we, the viewer, looking out of or in through the metal bars? In this sense, Within recalls the early paintings of Francis Bacon from the 1950s where within the "claustrophobic curtained setting, there looms up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows" (David Sylvester, 'Francis Bacon’, The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954).

Within derives from a pre-existing Polaroid snapshot taken by the artist of a model in his studio. Irrespective of the subject matter, size or palette of a specific painting, Tuymans renders each work - the present piece included - within the span of a single day. Given this, Tuymans imparts pleasure into even his most ominous paintings, and Within, for its part, further honours the joy of the medium through its depiction of paintings. This confidence in the painterly medium is one Tuymans defiantly assumed in the latter part of the Twentieth Century, precisely at the time his contemporaries were keen to deem painting "dead".

Tuymans' deliberate reluctance to be entirely representational enables his paintings to underscore an intellectual, emotional and symbolic treatment of themes. The present painting compels the viewer inward to the profoundly haunting thematic narrative. Curator Helen Molesworth writes, "Forfeiting the logic of painting's death... permitted Tuymans's divestment from the medium's slow and seemingly inexorable turn toward abstraction and instead activated its specifically narrative qualities" (Exhibition Catalogue, Helen Molesworth, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Luc Tuymans, 2009, p. 19). Tuymans investment of everyday objects as his subject - a seemingly banal birdcage in the case of the present work - and his deconstruction of them, creates an altogether deeper narrative: for the artist, the meaning is always more important than the image. Within presents a supremely sophisticated composition, subtly challenging its viewer to envision a story and celebrate its medium.