feAture tuymans & sasnal
WS: Sometimes the painting paints itself. I don’t control it, and it
becomes something else, but I don’t mind. There are failures, too, of
course, but I don’t mind failures.
LT: I think failures should be allowed in the process of painting, which
for me is largely about timing and precision.
WS: You know when to stop?
LT: You can easily go too far and lose it. The eyes are too cold and
black, you know, too prescriptive, they don’t function anymore.
WS: Do you wash over them when you are not happy with the work?
and a breaking point, where the essence of a painting lies. In my case it
LT: I used to, I had to because I didn’t have the money to buy new is never in the centre.
canvases. A painting like Man Drinking [1998] or La Correspondance
[1985], there are about ten or twelve other versions underneath, but WS: I’m sceptical about mastery in painting. I couldn’t look at old
now I have the luxury to just throw them away. paintings after I had finished school. I think I had three years of not going
to any museums with old paintings. I wanted to burn them. Somehow
WS: The piece can be more timeless when it is washed over and I worked it through. I am freer now.
painted again.
LT: As you see, I don’t have any paintings here, because I can’t stand to
LT: When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making be confronted with my own work – I just see the mistakes. In a museum,
paintings, you know exactly what you are doing. When I start to paint, I don’t have a problem, but when I go to a collector’s home, I sit with my
it is real agony, I get nervous. The day before, I am already working up back to the painting.
to it. Then I get to the studio, and once the image starts to emerge
and come together, pleasure kicks in. And then you can see things that WS: I once went to a house where there were paintings of mine, and
no other person can see. And then the most important things in the I didn’t feel anything but indifference. They weren’t mine anymore.
painting become these small details. Every painting has a weakness
LT: I would like to experience that just once in my lifetime, to go to
a show of my own work and look at it as somebody else’s.
WS: You never keep anything for yourself?
LT: No. Not very smart, but I can’t. I cannot stand to have my own work
in my house. I am also not a fetishist. I just don’t do that.
See Listings for current and upcoming exhibitions of work by Luc Tuymans
and Wilhelm Sasnal
WORKS
(In ORdeR Of appeaRance)
Wilhelm Sasnal, Kielce (Ski Jump), 2003
oil on canvas, collection of the artist
Luc Tuymans, Der Architekt, 1997
oil on canvas, 113 x 145 cm
courtesy Zeno X Gallery, antwerp
Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Hunters), 2001
oil on canvas, 150 x 170cm
© the artist. courtesy Rubell family collection, Miami
Luc Tuymans, Man Drinking, 1998
oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm
courtesy Zeno X Gallery, antwerp
49 Artreview
Tuymans/Sasnal.indd 49 8/1/08 09:57:52
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