Evidence

Luc Tuymans’ Evidence exemplifies the Belgian painter’s signature style with its ephemeral composition and striking subject matter. At first glance, the present work depicts what appears to be a pale, almost featureless, figure rendered with diffused brushstrokes and the restrained palette that is typical of Tuymans’ celebrated work. Upon closer inspection however, Evidence reveals an altered photograph, recalling the artist's most revered paintings which are sourced from found images, film stills and news clippings—and transformed into oblique figurations filled with contrast and shadow. Here, Tuymans displays his trademark process of translating a source image into something powerful and ambiguous. The faint figure appears to fade into a dense grey fog that obstructs any clear lines of sight. The reticent creams, blues, and purples applied in thin layers of paint carry a sense of erasure and distance that contribute to the work’s disquieting dialectic between clarity and ambiguity, movement and stillness.

Tuymans’ Evidence is sourced from a forensic composite image attempting a likeness of an unidentified victim of a Russian serial killer. The original sketch was created by a forensic scientist which was then left on his studio floor for years, being carelessly scraped and trampled. Recalling Rudolf Stingel, whose paintings were placed on his studio floor so that they became soiled, or Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s The Large Glass after it had collected a year's worth of dust, Evidence is created in part through the artist’s neglect and the subsequent accumulation of residue. In this way, Tuymans’ process also becomes a metaphor for his figure’s tragic fate: Soviet authorities did not believe in mass murderers, so the victim’s case languished and was eventually lost to time. The painting thus echoes the moral attitude toward the victim. Its masterful composition and conceptual process work in tandem to deface the source image, effectively erasing the individuality of the figure. As a result, Tuymans destabilizes the reliability of the forensic evidence, suggesting a crisis in representation, and putting the general idea of objectivity on trial. Evidence can be seen as a meditation that reveals and conceals deeper truths of political corruption and the failings of recollection. Refusing resolution, spectacle, or lofty attempts to memorialize the unnamed victim, the work literally blurs the line between factual record and subjective perception, interrogating the very idea of testimony and by extension, memory.

As one of the most renowned contemporary artists of his generation, Tuymans’ influence can be seen across a generation of painters engaged with history, memory and the ubiquity of images in contemporary life. His conceptual approach to painting, which marked a decisive turn in the 1990s by reasserting the medium’s potential in light of the rise of multimedia installation and digital art, is put on full display in Evidence, and the work was exhibited in the artist’s groundbreaking solo show entitled Nice, staged at the Menil Collection in Houston (2013–14). Here, Tuymans has said “it is the inertia of the face that really interests me” and chose to display the unidentified figure in Evidence alongside a collection of four African masks that lack any clear record of origin or signification (R. Kamps, Nice, exh. Cat., Menil Collection, Houston, 2013, p. 68). Tuymans’ curation thus sets into motion an interplay between his portrait and the masks, suggesting shared themes of frozenness, dislocation, and irresolution. Both objects are in this sense for Tuymans lost spirits, or apparitions of figures erased from personal and historical memory by virtue of being displayed while decontextualized. Evidence is a haunting work offering a window into the artist’s profoundly poignant thought process as it grapples with the passage of time and remembrance.