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Lot Essay
‘I think most abstraction comes out of the element of dispersion, and this was already clear in 1925 when Mondrian made the remark that you could not perceive the world as a whole anymore – you could only see it in particles.’
– Luc Tuymans
At over a metre wide, Luc Tuymans’ Yellow, 1986, clearly announces the cinematic and photographic influences that underpin much of his subsequent practice. Covered in magnified diamonds that alternate between canary yellow and a more muted grey, Yellow presents a focused section of what appears to be a tiled floor, each shape partially truncated, with imprecise outlines that echo the blur of a videotape film still. In the early 1980s, Tuymans briefly abandoned painting in favour of film, and throughout his practice, he has employed framing devices and techniques such as cropping, enlarging, the long-shot and the close-up, learnt during these early experiments with a Super 8 camera. For Tuymans, all genres of painting are interchangeable, and Yellow demolishes the hierarchical relationship by being at once a landscape, still-life and portrait. Part of its appeal comes from Tuymans’ sensitivity to paint on the canvas, even regarding his treatment of the banal and unremarkable; this is a painting that evokes ‘a delicate engagement that mysteriously feels as necessary as a raft in a flood. The flood is the noise of the world. The work is perfectly silent’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Flemish Master’, The New Yorker, October 12, 2009, n. p.).
– Luc Tuymans
At over a metre wide, Luc Tuymans’ Yellow, 1986, clearly announces the cinematic and photographic influences that underpin much of his subsequent practice. Covered in magnified diamonds that alternate between canary yellow and a more muted grey, Yellow presents a focused section of what appears to be a tiled floor, each shape partially truncated, with imprecise outlines that echo the blur of a videotape film still. In the early 1980s, Tuymans briefly abandoned painting in favour of film, and throughout his practice, he has employed framing devices and techniques such as cropping, enlarging, the long-shot and the close-up, learnt during these early experiments with a Super 8 camera. For Tuymans, all genres of painting are interchangeable, and Yellow demolishes the hierarchical relationship by being at once a landscape, still-life and portrait. Part of its appeal comes from Tuymans’ sensitivity to paint on the canvas, even regarding his treatment of the banal and unremarkable; this is a painting that evokes ‘a delicate engagement that mysteriously feels as necessary as a raft in a flood. The flood is the noise of the world. The work is perfectly silent’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Flemish Master’, The New Yorker, October 12, 2009, n. p.).