Michaël Borremans: “We’re all just a species of monkey, just more deranged”

Michaël Borremans wants to make you laugh. Not a sort of guttural, belly-shaking laugh, more of a knowing titter that might, if you let it, help you understand yourself a bit better.

I meet the Belgian artist at David Zwirner one afternoon in late May. It’s the installation day of his show ‘The Monkey’ and although everything looks reception-ready, there’s some calm-after-storm in the air. Borremans says he’s sleepy; he seems vibrant. He describes himself as clumsy; he seems composed. His paintings on the wall look sombre; he is brimming with wit. But then again, this is an artist who trades in deceiving appearances.

There are two strains to Borremans’ work. There’s the beauty, the sublimity of Rococo, Baroque, Romanticism – and the weight of all that painted history (as a child, he used to walk around museums and imagine the classical paintings were like Narnia). And then there’s the humour. Borremans gleans as much joy from Monty Python as Goya and Grünewald. “Humour is essential in everything and in every situation,” he tells me as we sit down on the second floor of his show. “Taking yourself too seriously is arrogance. For me, humour is a necessity in life, to get through it.”

‘The Monkey’ is London’s sister exhibition to Borremans’ 2022 show ‘The Acrobat’ at David Zwirner’s New York gallery. This younger sibling has been in the works for two years. Glancing around the 17 modestly-sized, immaculately rendered works, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Borremans might not need much space. In the early years, he never even had a studio. “I felt I could work anywhere,” he says as the late spring sun flares through the gallery window. “I could work in my mother’s kitchen so long as it had a table and some daylight.”

He got his first proper studio in Ghent in 1993 when he was 30 (he only began painting when he was 35). Now he has three, including one “house in the woods”, and another hangar-like space which he’s currently reconverting. “If I’m tired of a certain project or don’t know how to continue with a painting, I just go to another studio.”

Borremans admits that he doesn’t really have a working routine, though he aspires to one. “I don’t have the discipline. I’m too chaotic. If I try not to work, I start to work without realising and never do bad things. If I take it lightly, if I’m not too serious, I perform better. But then sometimes, I make paintings against my will, I force myself, and that works too, so that’s confusing”, he says, chuckling at his own contradictions. “I really just want to be a Flâneur!”

There are some rituals: he listens to jazz music during painting breaks (“I used to smoke a cigarette, now I put a record on”); he always stands up to work because “it gives life to my paintings”; he puts the reference imagery on a monitor on a tripod a couple of metres away “because I don’t want to lose myself in details like eyelashes and pores.” Most of the time Borremans is in the studio he’s not painting. When he has an idea, he often sits on it for a few days. “The act of painting is not what takes the most time,” he explains. “I wait until the day I cannot wait, cannot hold myself anymore. It’s about anticipation and intensity.”

Many might view being short-sighted as a hindrance; for Borremans, in painting at least, it’s a blessing. “When I paint without my glasses, I paint better”, he explains. “I can focus on the essence. I see the tonalities better, and have to find a way to simplify details with brushstrokes.”

Borremans’ paintings are riddled with contradictions, plot holes and twists. These are mostly paintings of people, so portraits, right? Apparently not. Borremans is adamant: he doesn’t paint portraits. So what are we looking at? There are monkeys (and we’ll get to those) but there are other species among us, decked in outlandish costumes which Borremans sourced from a Hollywood film studio: an adolescent boy dressed as a coy cowboy, another is helmeted and ready for fight or flight, one is wrapped in an excessive puffer jacket that could be for combat, catwalk or casting call. So much emotion; so little expression. How does he do that? Borremans is an artist, but he also has the conceptual dexterity of a taxidermist, embalmer, puppeteer or theatre director. “Everything is always staged,” he says. “I found in painting that the more I limit myself, the more expression I get. That’s why all my figures are in undefined space, with no information, which draws much more attention to the object itself.”

It’s in his use of that word, object, that it all begins to make sense. “In a way, I objectify humans,” he says. “I paint them as if they were still life.” If each figure is a figurine, then each canvas is a vitrine; holding not a person, but a hollow vessel that’s been posed and staged. The thing about objects is they don’t need to hold their own. We collect them because they can contain some of us within them, and never let on. People are so much more complicated.

Borremans embraces all the clichés of classical painting: the landscapes, the portraits, the still lifes. “Painting is [now] liberated from its traditional functions, so it’s free as a medium for expression… I don’t like much contemporary painting. I’m sometimes embarrassed that I’m a painter,” he jokes. “I generalise, that wouldn’t be respectful. There are lots of artists who are very good at painting,” he says, referencing Miriam Cahn and Neo Rauch.

“In our psychology and common knowledge of Western culture, portraiture has always been a highly esteemed format in painting. I want to start from the portrait for practical reasons because it’s a genre that’s recognisable to the beholder. I think it’s easier to connect with the image.” This is what Borremans has done at David Zwirner: wrapped us in a blanket of familiarity. As soon as we’re comfortable, he throws us off the scent. It’s always just on the tip of your tongue, just out of reach, a word, a thing, an idea, forever swimming in peripheral vision. “It’s close to a lot of things that you can put your finger on, but it just escapes,” he says.

The elephant in the room is a monkey. There are five of them and they don’t even get introduced until the second floor of the exhibition. Borremans’ protagonist is a nod to Jean Siméon Chardin’s Le Singe Peintre (The Monkey Painter) (1739/1740). Chardin’s painting is a caricature of the artist. Borremans’ is that, and a lot more. “If I do a portrait of a monkey and hang it on the wall, it’s a conceptual gesture, just like Marcel Duchamp did with his objects,” he says. “I also want to allude to the fact that we’re all just a species of monkey, just more deranged and incapable of living in harmony with others,” he says. The plot thickens when we learn that Borremans’ monkey is also not really a monkey, but a painting of a photograph of a figurine of a monkey. It took him a while to find the right source material. By chance, he came across a collection of porcelain figurines at auction, a group of monkeys that formed a band. There was a horn player, a trumpeter and a flautist, but Borremans’ favourite was the drummer; drawn to its simplicity and sobriety, and the fact that it didn’t have an instrument obscuring his face. For these, Borremans has also deployed a relatively new painting technique involving many layers of transparent oil paint – it gives an extra sense of lustre and depth. “I did the first [painting], then I couldn’t stop, so I painted five,” he says. “Sometimes the monkeys are more human than the people.”

Here he is, adorned in blue and gold regalia, a variation in five angles. In one painting, the monkey looks military, stoic. Another looks like a classical society portrait. One, full frontal looks like a mugshot or Hinge profile pic. Borremans gazes over his shoulder and points to a different variation. “I’ve called her ‘The Queen’ because she somehow really looks like Queen Elizabeth.”

Borremans wants to create “mental vibrations” that “refuse to be read”. His characters have all the biological trappings of humanity, but seem immune to conventional emotions, impervious to the instincts inherited from their supposed ancestors, those needed for social connection and survival. These beasts need to survive nothing but the gaze of the onlooker.

“My memory is very poor. I just remember atmospheres,” he says in a Warholian riff. And that’s it really, my enduring memory of Borremans’ show. I didn’t remember the people; their faces or outfits, but the sinister, sarcastic atmosphere they created in the space; the secrets I left inside them and how they made me mock my own ridiculous, embarrassing humanity.

In each painting, there seems to be someone just outside the frame: tweaking the genetic code, pulling the puppet strings, passing judgement. They shape these objects like putty in their own image, projecting onto them all they think they know of the world. They envy their emotional detachment while pitying the state of them. That someone, as Borremans has so deftly engineered, is you.