LAM - Premonitions

15-11-2016

LaM, Villeneuve d'Asq (FR)

Luc Tuymans. Premonitions

Since the 1990s, works on paper, from drawings to prints, have become an intrinsic part of his work. He has experimented with as many different reproduction techniques (including use of multiple limestone blocks, one per colour, for lithography, stencils set between ink and substrate for screen-printing, aquatinting with acid, and direct inking of substrates for single-print monotyping) as he has substrates (the traditional sheet of paper, wallpaper, PVC, etc.) and conditions governing image visibility (size, framing, materials, colours, tints, transparency, etc.).

Following the exhibition devoted to him at La Louvière’s Centre for Engraving and the Printed Image as part of Mons European Capital of Culture 2015, this exhibition will use this corpus of images as a starting point. But it will also highlight the full range of his experiments and the lines of thought that lead to a work’s creation, from source image to choice of medium: pencil drawing, watercolour, print or painting… For his Le Temple series (1996), Tuymans based his work on a documentary on the Mormons and their huge personal databank. “I painted watercolours of surveillance camera images, then took Polaroids of the watercolours, then made watercolours of the Polaroids, and so on… I asked my printer to remove all the black and only use Van Dyck brown in its place, which he had never done before.” This ghostlike series of prints provides a perfect illustration of the border between representation and reality and its dissolution in the image that is at the root of all Tuymans’ work.

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