In your work there's a kind of reluctance to portray human images. It's not that they don't exist; they do, but they are defaced, erased, as if deprived of identity. Take Heillicht (1991), which shows a doctor's face covered by a mask, or The Conversation (1987), in which two men are portrayed as two monsters, their faces smeared. In DDR (1990) the left panel also shows someone's face daubed or smeared. The seated figure in Hands, the piece you have lost from 1978, has no face, or at least not a distinguishable face. Another work I like very much, Nr. 3 (1978), shows four half-naked figures, their faces kind of covered. Angel (1992) depicts a faceless angel playing the harp. All these works seem to speak of camouflage-you've even painted a piece entitled Camouflage. And finally Nr. 6 (1978) depicts a sort of hooded, masked man. Why this insistence on a blurred or hidden identity?
Tuymans
Nr. 6 and Hands are very old pieces, about the idea of isolation. I still work in isolation, in a very small room with a big mirror. If you look very intensely at your face your traits disappear and you see only a black hole, leaving only the background. I had the idea of surrounding myself with fake figures or, worse, fake personalities that you can only see as different self-portraits. I destroyed a lot of those portraits. In Nr. 6 the face was painted afterwards on paper and glued with paint on top where the face should be. These are very existential images, and from a very existential level they grew into something very rationalized. I don't want to make portraits on a psycho-logical level. I take all the ideas out of individuality and just leave the shell, the body. To make a portrait of someone on a psychological level, for me, is an impossibility; I am much more interested in the idea of masks, of creating a blindfolded space of mirrors.
Aliga
There's another piece dealing with childhoood called Silent Music (1992). It's a fairly large picture showing an interior packed with furniture. There is a sense of malaise, maybe due to the pastel colours, and the stifling atmosphere. The space is too crowded.
Tuymans
But at the same time it's empty. The bed is unmade; the chair empty; the cupboard closed. The light source is unclear. You have the sense that you're peering in through an open door. And pink and blue are typically children's colours, for a child's room that someone else has prepared for you. In that sense it's horrific. If you look carefully at the image you realize that the chair is bigger than life-size; it couldn't be for a child. It is not my room but a sort of universal kid's room, turned into a prison, a cell. The objects are things you need to survive; a bed, a table, a chair, a cupboard. The colours are meant to be friendly and yet there's a sense of claustrophobia. A lot of my imagery has a sense of coziness which is turned into something terrifying. Anything banal can be transformed into horror. Violence is the only structure underlying my work. It's both physical and detached at the same time.
There is a link between annihilation,
hygiene, consumerism, production and propaganda. When you think about hygiene
sometimes it can be connected to ethnic cleansing. This can appear as an
economical and rational perspective. The final solution is something hidden,
and I want to integrate that into the cultural discourse. It could be seen as a
metaphor for the culture we live in. I see it as something that might happen again,
as a possibility. I don’t want to take a moral stance, but I want to oppose the
taboo aspect of it. The biggest reaction against the war in former Yugoslavia
came when people saw prisoners behind barbed wire fences. The perversity of the
image made people react, triggered our collective memory of the Nazi camps.
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Most of my paintings are not painted on a
stretcher. They are painted on a piece of canvas or on a piece of board. When
the image is finished I just a paint a white ribbon around it to focus it. That’s
the last thing I do when the painting is finished. It gives me the chance to
alter the size of the image. None of my paintings is framed it evens itself
out. The visibility drops and a kind of gloominess appears on the painting, a
sort of second skin. That gives people the impression that the paintings are similar.
There is continuity in the way I approach
painting. The notion of contrast, of outline and shadow, is very significant in
my work. I have made a group of pieces about shadows and mirrors because they
create immaterial spaces. It’s hard to depict them, it’s challenging especially
for someone like me who thinks that painting is only about precision. It has
nothing to do with virtuosity; it’s a necessity. Most of my work could at first
look clumsy, deprived of aesthetic elements. I am not into aesthetics; I am
into meaning and necessity. Folk art works in a similar way. It’s about
anonymous elements, something that is now owned by anybody in particular. It’s
a collective thing, it’s precise, it may look banal at first but it isn’t.
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I cannot work otherwise. It’s about truly
focusing, and that is sexually loaded. It’s true concentration, true intensity.
When I fail to reach that breaking point it is not accurate and it never will
be. That’s why it is very sexual. It’s another type of arousal.