Critical Reflection
Tuymans' work from 2006-2011 gradually escapes from the heavy political issues and develops from the triple side of classical religion, entertainment symbols and visual media respectively. Tracing his roots to the sources of European ideology, the artist captures a range of classical imagery of Jesus Christ and explores its influence on politics, education and the media. Using his own low- chroma filters, Tuymans reinterprets these important symbols in the Western public perception system. Here traditional religions, which have seen their ups and downs, are reborn. I feel a quiet strength in Tuymans' work, a silence that is not necessarily beautiful, reflected in his images as an undercurrent, one might even call it a mild terror, but all the unease is undermined in the artist's work.
In the Rinder chapter of the sublime book it is written that Tuymans can easily be seen as a kind of history painter whose art responds to an era of ultra-nationalism and resurgent fascism. Our recent history has also been a period of shockingly sordid events and revelations. For example, the mysterious deaths of two girls in 1997 led to the exposure of a child sex slave ring that spread to the very high levels of Belgian police force and government. There are echoes of such contemporary social traumas in Tuymans' work although these echoes may be faint, obscured, or couched in allegory. The artist tackles similar themes in an understated way. ‘The artist is appealing to a feature of the modern psyche, a waning of superstitious thinking mixed with a lingering nostalgia for the viscerality of evil. The dreadful subject matter or the kitschy sublime leaves the painter's time, bathed in a strange nostalgic afterglow (sublime, p186).’ Looking at myself through Luke's work, in addition to the very personal self-contradictions in the images, is also perhaps my way of tracing a kind of downgraded divinity.
Barnett Newman has an interesting passage in 'The sublime is now' about the relationship between beauty and the sublime, which is not only found in the perfection of form, but needs to be detached from beauty to form a more powerful state of mind. In the Renaissance, the revival of the Greek ideal of beauty set artists the task of reformulating an accepted Christian legend in the light of absolute beauty, in opposition to the original Gothic ecstasy of the legend's evocation of the absolute. This ecstasy was reflected in the absolutism of perfect creation and a fetish for quality. Many Renaissance artists expressed the traditional ecstasy by depicting eloquent nudity or rich velvet. ‘Michelangelo could despise with good reason the beauty cults who felt the christ drama on a stage of rich velvets and brocades and beautifully textured flesh tints.(sublime, p25-26)' For in his sculptures he eschews ornate elements to express his desire for a grand statement of Christianity through fierce sculptural forms. This sublime spirituality is reflected in the artistic pursuit of destroying the sexy and flattering. Newman's quest for the sublime is extreme, and he advocates liberation from the barriers of memory, association, nostalgia, mythology and so on.
Reflecting on the individuals, I have taken a piece each from Tuymans and Newman, the former's influence focusing on the choice and handling of images. The choice of images can be implemented in tiny details - A childhood immersion in the sacred state of religion, a pious and somewhat paranoid elder in church, the juxtaposition of sin and pleasure in the mind. At the same time the blurring process is used to change the nature of the image, the sacred and the bizarre, the perfect and the mutilated, the corrupt and the vibrant, and the tension of the image is obtained through the contrasts. However, I am not able to give up the specific image completely at the moment, I am still obsessed with nostalgia, association and also religious mythology, so I do not want to pursue a purely conceptual sublime in the Newman style. The latter inspires me to think more about how to balance subjective feelings with formal beauty, the pull between the two, and to avoid falling into the trap of beauty or pure sensation.
Everyone must 'atone' for such suffering in exchange for future harmony, then 'the price of harmony is also too expensive, we simply cannot afford to pay to enter that state, so I am anxious to return my entrance ticket' - The Brothers Karamazov Part I, Chapter 5
Whether it is painting or literature, complex contradictions and intense hairsplitting can lead me into the depths of my imagination, taking a pleasure from the tangled inner feelings. My recent reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's literature has had a profound effect on me. If Bataille freed me from my animalistic side, Dostoyevsky made me dig deeper and deeper into my human nature. Divinity and sinfulness, sin and salvation, faith and questioning. The writer himself is a devout believer, yet his works are full of questions and queries about God. It can be said that his contradictory worldview has contributed to his artistic talent. I think it is difficult to accurately represent the psychological detail of a literary work in a painting, nor is it necessary to articulate a clear storyline, which is not what painting needs to do. In my recent work, sublime themes and strange atmospheres; involuntary approaches and untimely escapes, I wanted to show the chaos and complexity of these things, perhaps distilling and bringing the true feelings and emotions of the heart, which I gained through reading Dostoyevsky.
Secondly, this lack of ambiguity and confusion of emotion also prompted me to ask myself how to give the painting a richer layer based on the religious context? Sigrid Holmwood's working strategy might be a very useful model for me. as Sigrid's practice addresses the materiality and circulation of painting through the relationship between painting and the image of the peasant, thus extending painting. The image of the peasant is very important to the artist as she is the person who must be excluded in order to construct modernity. In representing the peasant, the bourgeois subject constructs the self through what she is not, either by denigrating the 'backward' peasant or romanticising the 'old way of life'. Either way, in Western European thinking, the peasant is pushed into the distant past, despite the millions of contemporary peasants who are in conflict with modernization projects around the world. Amerindian thinking is based on perspectivism, the opposite of modernity/colonialism, the Indian perspectivism that sees everything as human (including animals, plants, minerals) but what separates them is the different perspectives expressed by their bodies. Sigrid applies Amerindian research methods to her practice by growing plants to obtain pigments. By interacting with the plants, the earth and the pigments, she recreates the peasant perspective of her imagination and the painting expands into a performance. In Sigrid's understanding of peasant painting, the peasant is no longer a passive figure to construct a bourgeois, modern subject, but rather a point of view: peasant painting. These elements have given her peasant paintings a more diverse content.
In contrast, in my practice, apart from personal experiences and familiar historical allusions, is it possible to escape from these familiar experiences and move into a wide range of sources. This is something that excites me greatly, but at the same time is a great challenge.
Reference :
Morley, S. (2010) ‘The sublime is now ’, in The sublime. London: Whitechapel, pp. 25–26.
Morley, S. (2010a) ‘Lawrence rinder ’, in The sublime. London: Whitechapel, p. 186.
Sigrid Holmwood (no date) sigridholmwood. Available at: https://sigridholmwood.co.uk/ (Accessed: 22 May 2023).
‘Sickert recalled his youthful experience as an actor by acting in his own painting’ – Sickert and his theatre (no date) National Museums Liverpool. Available at: https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/sickert-recalled-his-youthful-experience-actor-acting-his-own-painting-sickert-and-his (Accessed: 22 May 2023).