LUC TUYMANS AND THE ART OF ABSENCE

In 2007 Luc Tuymans was invited to exhibit his work at the Kabinet fur aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven, Germany. His 1993 exhibit there comprised a series of five paintings, but the new exhibit appeared, at first glance, to be an empty room.

On further study, subtle details revealed themselves. The floor was covered with a plastic film, making it a flawlessly smooth surface, unmarked by tiles or joints. The walls were painted a pale grey that shaded into blue or green with the light at different times of day. On the floor and one wall grey paint marked the shadow of the struts from the window. The negative space in the shadow was painted white. The door handle cast no shadow; nor did the lettering on the glass door. Through sleight of hand, the physical space of the gallery had been turned, almost imperceptibly, into an abstraction.

The work was called -Ende-, and was inspired by Edward Hopper's painting, "Sun in an Empty Room", which shows light coming through a window, the shadow of the window cast on the wall and floor of the room. Hopper said he had been interested in this embodiment of emptiness his whole life. "I've always been intrigued by an empty room. At school we would discuss what a room looks like when no-one's to be seen and nobody even looks in," he once said. Tuymans says the title -Ende- refers to this painting, as it was one of the last Hopper made.

Tuymans's new book of the same name consists of his own Polaroid photographs of the project. He likens the role of Polaroids in his artistic process to that of sketches or drawings. In a note in the book, Anri Sala writes about the importance of their ephemerality. "The Polaroid cannot hold the scene forever; with time its image will fade away like the slow motion disappearance of a shadow."

This quality of hovering on the verge of disappearance runs through Tuymans' work. "Very many of your pictures seem fleeting at first glance, phantom, like a mist that draws up momentarily before it vanishes again. They're translucent–diaphanous," said Udo Kittelmann, director of Frankfurt's Museum für Moderne Kunst, in an interview with the artist. Tuymans responded: "The pictures are intended to operate in the mind above all: to come back when they're no longer visible. It's the representation of the invisible, the omitting that opens deeper layers of significance...that's why you have to bring in this area of void."

The problem of the empty room touches on the Zen koan of the sound of a tree falling with no one to hear it, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In another catalogue essay, Moritz Wesseler writes, "Thence the impression of the space in -Ende- was almost that it was no longer of this world. With his work, Tuymans seemed to be making the point that the question as to 'what a room looks like when no-one's to be seen and nobody even looks in,' defies human reason–that, if an answer is to be found at all, it must lie beyond our imagination."

The actual room turned into an abstraction of a room. The painted shadow on the floor was then photographed with a Polaroid camera, whose pictures will soon fade away. This deceptively simple project is a small, beautiful gesture from an artist whose work tends to address silence and absence. "The pictures are mute and have a completely different dialectic, a totally different aspiration," says Tuymans. "The idea of disappearing has been there for years now. The distance is increasing all the time."

"-Ende-" (Salon Verlag & Edition) by Luc Tuymans, out now

~ CATHERINE CORMAN