Painting is dead. Long live painting

In lurid oranges and blurred blacks, the US-Mexico border is seen through the eye of a pathfinder and night-vision goggles (Diego Herman). Two lovers laze about on the floor of their chic apartment, but both sets of eyes are transfixed elsewhere – as though they know their relationship is doomed but they have not yet found words to acknowledge it (Shirley Villavicencio Pizango). On her hands and knees, a young woman hoovers the carpet of an impossibly red room, revealing ghostly bodies below the surface (Bendt Eyckermans). These are just some of the highlights among the 74 painters brought together for the major survey ‘Painting after Painting’, held at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent, a former casino, citadel, and floral display hall around the back of the city’s nightclub district. Like the ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’ survey at the Hayward Gallery in 2021, S.M.A.K.’s group show could be accused of being too big and too small at the same time: too big because no thread can be long enough to thoroughly connect each work, and too small because the 75th best artist to have anything to do with Belgium will be cross that their invite got lost in the post. Be that as it may be, what a show this is. It’s wild and weird and wonderful. It could be twice as big and still keep you guessing. ‘Painting after Painting’ suggests a new era of painting has arrived, after an older one has died. Painting moves in cycles. Every generation screams that the practice has died (‘nothing new can be done!’ etc.) until a new generation resuscitates it from the morgue floor.

When it comes to painting, Belgium has always punched above its weight. I am not just talking about the art godfathers who loom over the scene like one of René Magritte’s clouds: Michaël Borremans and Luc Tuymans, both Flemish (from the Dutch-speaking north) and both masters of unnerving and dreamlike atmospheres. Tuymans turned his hand to curating in 1999 and assembled a seminal survey, ‘Trouble Spot: Painting’ at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, which was surely a model for Tanja Boon and Ann Hoste, curators of the S.M.A.K. show who, while discounting any artist born before 1970, predominantly focus on those painters born half a generation or more later. There is an uneasy relationship between the Walloons (from the French-speaking south) and the Flemish, like estranged cousins forced to sit together at the family function. “The show didn’t have many artists from Wallonia” one Flemish artist sheepishly tells me, as if to say that Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels (albeit a metropolitan enclave, like the Vatican, but part of the Flemish community) are where it’s at; Liège not really. It’s hard for an outsider like me to know if this split is significant or not, but then again most Belgians seem to feel like outsiders.

Even before Belgium was founded in 1830 as a mishmash of mostly Catholics seeking independence from the Netherlands, it was a place of contradictions, misnomers, and eccentrics. A great place for art, then. That great medieval oddball Brueghel the Elder painted everything from anarchic carnivals to Dulle Griet, who leads an army of women to pillage Hell while monstrous arseholes get sodomised by the thin edge of spoons. The so-called ‘Flemish Primitives’ (among them Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden) came next with their harsh symmetries and realer-than-real optics of insane scenes. James Ensor, who rolled up in the late nineteenth-century with his avant-garde group Les XX with his grotesque masquerades, spooky parades, and playing card spades, is probably the biggest influence for the new generation of Belgian painters. Belgian artists have always been kooky, offering up strange takes on history with a wry smile. I’ve taken you on this brief history lesson because many of the artists in ‘Painting after Painting’ do, too. They steal from the past. They are haunted by it. They make paintings which ape and imitate the Old Masters.

The work of Kati Heck is a case in point. When I asked Heck about why so many of these artists were taking on historical themes, she told me that Belgium still runs an old-school kind of art academy curriculum: lots of still lifes and nudes, lots of looking at Flemish Primitives. It tracks. If many of these artists seem contemporary it is because they are taking old subjects and doing new things to them. Heck, for her part, makes exquisitely bizarre paintings that aspire to take on universal themes – love, loneliness, lust, and the rest – in scenes that are both surreal and intensely believable. Heck is showing two works: Zum Teufel, Positionen! (2012), a self-portrait with still life elements mixed with zones of abstraction and creepy spectral hands, as well as Phantom Spurius (2023), which sees a man and a woman – loosely modelled on Adam and Eve, we presume – whose arse cheeks are joined together. Mae Dessauvage’s work is also interested in bodily transformations. In Dessauvage’s Revelation (2023), we encounter a figure who moves through four stages of life, with each stage chosen as one of the four surface sides of the work, which resembles an architectural doll’s house, and variously nursing a head bandage or holding a skull like Hamlet. A meditation of the trans experience, Dessauvage’s work plays on tropes of the memento mori (the Dutch master idea of having a skull in the picture to remind you of your mortality) and bodily transformations.

But not everyone was looking back into the annals of art history for ideas. Almost all the artists in the show are probably like you: a begrudging member of the first generation to grow up with the internet. It shows. But lots of artists face our troubled engagement with the image-world head on. William Ludwig Lutgens is a kind of Flemish Paul McCarthy: his huge painting Joy Sauce in the Belly #3 (2025) features a weird and wonderful room with a laptop screen playing recordings of happenings as mask-wearing creatures throw slop and muck and grime around. It’s disgusting and gross, but no more gross than what happens in the dark distances of a Breughel painting. Even those works ostensibly not about our screen addictions seem to bear the same kind of colours saturated by the glowing indium tin oxide which facilitates images on phone screens (the same chemicals you are likely reading this article through).

Joëlle Dubois depicts young millennials and Gen-Zs having sex, taking selfies, being distracted on their phones, and generally avoiding any kind of productive work. Dubois’ melancholic Cut to the Core (2024) depicts a woman illuminated by the blueish light of an out-of-view screen who is about to cut her hair in what we feel will be a symbolic gesture of great proportions, like Samson asleep or Britney in 2007. Dubois’ canvases are often shot through by a single hue, a little like Lisa Yuskavage’s pictures, but instead frame all the cluttered crap of modern life à la Hilary Pecis. Her work is funny and unnerving in equal measure. Meanwhile, the sophisticated work of Emmanuelle Quertain offers a fresh perspective on selfhood and distraction in darkened rooms where we only have screens for company. Quertain has produced an intimate series of snapshots of her online search history in the form of 44 aquarelle on Yupo paper rectangles, arranged in claustrophobic salon-style grids, and delivered with a Tuymans-esque lightness of touch.

After spending about two and a half hours in the show while feeling like I still hadn’t scratched the surface, I ran into Luis Lázaro Matos (Luis, from now on) downstairs. Luis is the Portuguese artist who produced perhaps the most baffling – and certainly the wittiest – work in the survey. In the central mezzanine zone, the Brussels-based artist was commissioned to make a gigantic mural: on one wall, we look up to an expanse of azure blue and gold (specifically the European Union flag but with iridescent sperm cells replacing the stars) combined with scenes of Riviera-inspired hedonism and queer bestiality featuring snakes, owls, and rats; on the other side, in red paint on columns of glass, we read a handwritten resignation letter signed off by a surrealist rat (or ‘Eurorat’, a play on the derisive moniker ‘Eurocrat’, someone who does admin for the EU). What does all this mean, you might ask? Well, at the height of lockdown in November 2020, Jozsef Szajer, a high-up member of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s far-right Fidesz party, which just last week banned LGBTQ+ gatherings, was caught covered in blood shuffling down a gutter in central Brussels. He was fleeing from the police who had stormed his gay orgy. Szajar soon resigned in disgrace. In this context, Luis’ mural is a hilarious intervention into sexual hypocrisy and political humiliation. You almost feel sorry for Szajar and wish he could live out his best life playing dress-up on the Riviera.

Later that evening, with Luis, his British writer friend Charlotte Norwood, and my Plaster compatriot Finn Constantine now in tow, we head out into Ghent. After golden hour drinks at Revue, an up-market resto perched on a medieval bridge, we have a steak-forward supper at Brasserie Midi, an old-fashioned white-tablecloth joint. We talk shop – politics, art, more politics – until Charlotte and Luis rush to get the last train back to Brussels. It was fantastic. By the time the antiquated streetlights begin to be extinguished in sequence, leaving the city’s old churches and cobblestones in near darkness, Finn and I think about Borremans and about why he has stayed in this city. The best part of Borremans’ work is that it looks old and new at the same time, as though millennials have thrown away their iPhones and joined a pagan cult or got into the ritualistic slaughter of rabbits while wearing streetwear. Many of the city’s streets don’t look like they have changed much in half a millennium but then there are moments – a flickering neon sign or some anti-EU graffiti, say – which jolt you back into the present. With the lights now all out, and after a night cap at the Sphinx Café and cinema, we say goodnight.

The following morning, after failing to see brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s famous altarpiece in Saint Bavo’s cathedral, Finn and I headed back to Brussels. Satiated by an exquisitely cheap and cheerful lunch of meze and sausage at Bij/Chez Jansens & Jansens, the go-to artist’s canteen, we visit Anastasia Bay’s studio. With its high ceilings, heraldic stained-glass windows, and doorstopper tomes on Picasso and Immendorff, it’s an art lover’s paradise. Bay was one of the exhibition’s knock-out artists. In the expansively white and light-filled entrance to S.M.A.K. the Paris-born painter made a gorgeously aqueous 35-metre fresco on the condition of womanhood. Her large-format paintings of harlequins, mythological figures, and performers, which blur limbs with costumes and are contorted into impossible postures that remind you of Francis Bacon if he only hated people less. Bay’s fresco looks as though it was made only with water on a soaked surface. (In fact, many of her works are made using pastels to establish line and compositional structure, and then the porous quality is created by washed-out acrylic on top).

Responsive to the vexed tradition of the nude and especially the format of ‘les baigneuses’ (‘the bathers’, in Fragonard, Gleizes, et al.) in which men just so happen to catch sight of women naked and washing themselves in bucolic idylls, Bay turns this around to reflect on motherhood, growing up, and growing old. There is an honesty to her work, despite its focus on performance, and an old soul quality. Bay tells me that she collaborated on an opera last year with multidisciplinary musician Joseph Schiano di Lombo, entitled Maestra Lacrymae (or ‘Mistress of Tears’), with characters including Artemis, Dibutades, and Pénélope. It all feels very la bohème in the best possible sense. She is representative of a dominant trend of artists here who are making strides forward but have turned their heads to the past.

Bay now shares her studio with Julien Saudubray, who makes wonderfully luminescent paintings in awkward oblongs of eyes and rising suns that sit somewhere between Rothko and Af Klint. For a short time, Bay split a place with Victoria Palacios;  the two share an antiquated love of the theatre and forgotten folk traditions. Palacios, the daughter of a professional clown from Argentina, grew up listening to biniou bagpipes in Brittany. Herdensely worked paintings are playful, tactile, and musical (she also plays in a band, Alto Fuero, which has played at legendary Dalston venue Café OTO). With their scrawled cartoon faces of human-animal hybrids, Palacios’ paintings are the work of an artist who – and this is the case for many of those on display at S.M.A.K. – is fond of a surreal joke. From the holding pen of Brussels Midi station, we returned to London with an invigorated sense of what painting can do…  and excited for what comes next for these irascible Belgians. Painting is dead. Long live painting.