Curator: Oshima Santo
'My painting should be completely silent.'1
In 1905, an author named van Oudshoorn left Holland to take up a five-year position with the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. Each day during his absence he bought a postcard at the restaurant where he took lunch. Every day he sent the postcard home to his beloved, using a red pencil, he marked with a cross the table where he sat. This is the story that in 1985, moved the Belgium artist Luc Tuymans to paint again after a four-year self proclaimed 'crisis with painting'. He says of the work, 'The Correspondence is the picture of constant presence arising out of constant homesickness. A kind of complete hopelessness connected with the feeling of security'.2 He describes this as his first conceptual painting and it was included in the exhibition 'Luc Tuymans Sincerely' at the Tokyo Opera City Gallery in late 2000.
The Holocaust is one of two thematics in Tuymans's work, the other is more prosaic and concerns consumerism and sanitisation-both are underpinned with layers of violence. 'There is a sort of indifference in my paintings which makes them more violent, because any objects in them are as if erased, cancelled .'3 Silent, barely finished and under-worked, much of Tuymans's art distils generations of trauma into single paintings–in the artist's words, 'nostalgia as shared horror'. Meanwhile, the maudlin familiarity of suburbia and banal imagery stolen from advertising, become measures for (invisible) aberrant undercurrents, or the complexities and hypocrisies within socialised and institutionalised hierarchies. All paintings come only after an achingly-slow bringing together of lived and historical memory, sometimes distilled through a process of model-making. Tuymans's pictures are always painted within a day. This is