Luc Tuymans



Luc Tuymans "Within" (2001) oil on canvas.

 

 

After my feedback for semester one, with Liz, it was suggested that I look at the artist Luc Tuymans and in particular the piece "Within" (pictured above).

 

"Luc Tuymans paints the indescribable. His dark muted scenes seem vaguely familiar, distant, like haunting memories. Drawing his inspiration from grand themes, Luc Tuymans taps into a universal social guilt: from the Holocaust, or Imperialism, to child abuse. by minimalising his images, he created raw emotion through paint; each painting linking spiritually, somehow instinctively, to the rest.

 'Within' is a tranquil vermin metaphor for contamination and disease. A close-up detail of a bird cage, this painting more than conveys feelings of hopelessness and isolation: through its sheer size and potency, it literally traps the viewer, swallowing him into a prison of collective consciousness" (quote found on Saatchi gallery website)

 

Immediately after looking at "Within" by Luc Tuymans, I seen why this artist was suggested to me. As the paintings which I produced at the end of last semester were quite linear and looked like they were representing bars, also I was aiming to make the viewer feel trapped within the image, confused in a way. The 'bars' present in my work stemmed from a motif which I created in previous paintings, toward the end of last semester I started developing this motif so the lines were extended, I also started playing about with the 'bars' to create a form of confusion for the viewer. The canvases which I painted on were rather small, in attempt to draw the viewers in toward the paintings, then the 'bars' being there to trap the viewer. I really like the sizing of Tuyman's "Within", and I am planning on possibly producing some work on a larger scale of the same subject I have been working with, in order to test out if it would still work like I have been aiming.