Countdown
The scene takes place at the Louvre. The countdown has already begun. In less than a year it will be nothing more than a memory. Imagine a fresco doomed to obliteration, handmade by one of the most prominent painters of our time. This is the astonishing project put in place by Luc Tuymans (born in 1958) in the Richelieu wing of the Rotunda “Valentin de Boulogne” by the 17th century French paintings.
Enigmatic
The Belgian artist is known for using images taken with his phone or found online (See here and here reports and interviews about Luc Tuymans). From this often anodyne raw material he produces powerful works. He creates kinds of rebuses, enigmatic artworks in various formats which, through their execution, tread a fine line between figurative and abstract art.
Disorienting the visitors
Arresting film stills. Tuymans is clear. At the Louvre he wants to “disorient the visitor for a moment. Passing through this space they will be confronted by a painting from another dimension. Is it abstract? Figurative?”
Murder scene
For three of the four walls of the temporary fresco he’s been inspired by a video on YouTube by a painter from New Zealand. “I wasn’t interested in his work so much as the way he cleans his palette. He uses gloves. He wears an apron. It looks like a murder scene.
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Intense violence
There’s an intense violence induced there.” The painting as a crime… In the composition we can make out a hand, a palette, colours…
La piéta de Villeneuve-les-Avignon
Enguerrand Quarton
Every morning coming to his workshop, Tuymans would look at another hand, painted in around 1455 by Enguerrand Quarton for “La piéta de Villeneuve-les-Avignon”. “Look at Jesus’s hand. It is admirable,” comments the artist, who also points to a long, unusual scar and the drops of sweat on Jesus’s body.
Megalomaniacal place
Tuymans employs gently satirical humour. He described the Louvre as a “megalomaniacal place” saying: “when the guillotine was invented this place became a public institution,” in a riff on Georges Bataille’s famous quote (“The origin of the modern museum…is linked to the development of the guillotine”).
Vulnerable
For the fourth wall of the fresco he’s chosen to use one of his lost paintings from the 1990s: a doll’s head seen from behind. It lends it title, “The Orphan”, to the four compositions destined for removal. “I really like this temporary, vulnerable aspect. If the work had been designed to be permanent I would have done something else.”
We are already sorry that a painting will replace the fresco after 26 May 2025.
Until 26 May 2025. www.louvre.fr/expositions-et-evenements/expositions/l-orphelin-par-luc-tuymans
In the interview we note the misunderstanding of a word. Luc Tuymans talks about Géricault and I hear Chirico, which creates a confusion.
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