Meeting Luc Tuymans at the altar

When you start an art magazine, you make a wish list of artists you’d like to feature. Those you grew up admiring and who have shaped and changed the landscape of contemporary art. Right on top of that list was Luc Tuymans. But you never really thought you’d get far enough to actually see it happen.

There’s a girl, who later becomes my wife. I’m taking her around Tuymans’ 2019 Palazzo Grassi show in Venice. I try to act erudite; this is my chance to impress. I nod at the pictures, as if deeply contemplating them. She asks what it’s all about. “Imagery,” I answer wistfully. The truth is I don’t know what that means. “You really like it?” she presses. I sure do, but I can’t explain why.

I listen to a podcast on which Tuymans says his work is all about “the distrust of image.” Now I am lost, and in love with the work more than ever.

A chance email offers me the opportunity to meet him. He’s returning to Venice for a new commission for the 16th-century San Giorgio Maggiore church. The Benedictine monks are keen to redevelop their relationship with the arts. The ancient tradition of the church as benefactor rebirthed. They invited Tuymans to replace two Tintoretto masterpieces – The Last Supper and The Journey of the Israelites – for several months while they’re restored for the first time in 50 years. Immediately I say I’d love to.

Two weeks later it’s confirmed that I’ll be interviewing Tuymans. Fuck. I don’t know what to say; he’s going to tear me to pieces. What should I ask? Maybe about when he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and made work about Belgium’s colonial rule of the Congo? Maybe I could ask for his opinion on today’s political landscape?

I open an article in The Art Newspaper. The headline is a quote from Tuymans: “Art is not political”. Right, but he paints political subjects. My head hurts reading the article. I’m lost, I’m dazed, I’m enthralled. I need to understand. I click on his Wikipedia page in which he’s pictured in black and white with a shaved head. He’s handsome, like Kurtz in the jungle. We share the same birthday. Some common ground. People love people who share birthdays. I make a promise to mention that to him. Put him at ease, more importantly… put me at ease.

I land in Venice and meet my brother at the airport, who will take his portrait for this article. I think back to my A-level art history, when our focus was on Venetian Renaissance painting. We took a school trip to Venice to see Bellini, Titian… Tintoretto. I remember conversations of how the haze of light is what sets them apart from their Florentine counterparts. I think of Tuymans and the fuzz and blur in his images. Yet their effect is somehow pointed and razor sharp.

The water taxi from the airport takes us immediately to the church. We head down the Grand Canal, past the Palazzo Grassi, and the church looms in the distance, beckoning us over. We step off the boat. We’ve been given an hour with Tuymans and have been told to meet the press officer by the church altar. Before stepping in, my brother wants a smoke. I check my watch and see we are running slightly behind. I ask him to get a move on, he tells me to relax. He’s right, I am feeling on edge. I am nervous.

A man in a long black trench coat, black Balenciaga trousers and Nike trainers saddles up next to us. He is hunched over, pulling hard on his cigarette. My brother asks him for a light. He raises his head and smiles, reaching into his pocket to hand him his. Fucking hell, it’s Luc Tuymans stepping out for a smoke between interviews.

“I need to take a moment, I hate speaking to the press,” he says. Oh shit. That’s not a good start. A lady approaches us and I mistake her for his PR. I shake her hand and thank her. It turns out she is just a fan asking for a selfie. He laughs at my misunderstanding. My brother makes small talk with him. He is boisterous and funny. I shrug of my embarrassment and attempt to involve myself in the conversation. But in the back of my mind I am thinking of what to ask him. “Be present,” I tell myself.

He takes one final pull on his cigarette, drops it to the floor and crushes it with his boot. “Shall we head in?” He asks, taking control. He walks us to the altar. The church is vast. It is still an active monastery and hosts a regular congregation. This is very far from a white cube.

“It’s not a museum. It’s still a living space,” he tells me, and I realise the interview has started. I quickly dive to get my phone out to record our conversation. “I made it very clear to them from the start, it would not be religious.” At first, Tuymans rejected the proposal. Then a month before we met, he had an idea. Working alone in his studio, he completed the works in just two weeks. “One after the other,” he notes.

We walk up to the altar and there, on the left and right hand sides, are two monumental paintings. They are instantly recognisable as Tuymans’ style. One glows red and appears to be an image of some kind of standing stage light, the other a deep blue moody painting of two figures in the middle of the landscape canvas.

“So that image – which is called Musicians – is from when I was at the Busan Biennale in Korea. We were in this hotel. They had this horrid band playing in the bar, and the figures are the reflection of two band members in a vase,” he smirks. Only Tuymans could sneak a warped reflection of a Korean rock band into the altar of a 16th Century Venetian basilica and have the guts to call it Musicians. “It’s not naughty,” he shrugs. “But if you want to see religious context there is purgatory.” He turns to the vibrant red painting of stage lights and points, “There is hell.”

I ask where the image came from. “I ripped it off YouTube or something. It’s just a heating lamp.” It takes a special kind of nerve, or perhaps genius, to rip an image of a lamp off YouTube and hang it in place of Tintoretto.

As I stood gawping at the tension of this image and the religious context that surrounds it, Tuymans explains, “They liked it – though it was this painting or nothing,” chuckling to himself, his laugh booming around the empty basilica. The works glow – ethereal and rich. “Most paintings here, if they are not lit you don’t see them,” he notes. But the luminous red certainly catches your eye – Tuymans has made his painting look like it’s been plugged into an electric socket.

“You have to fight these surroundings, which are quite dominant. It’s a challenge. That is what makes it interesting.” He takes us away to his paintings and leads us to where the Tintoretto paintings are being restored. They have been placed in a side chapel, so as not to change their climate and will remain there for six months until they can be returned to the chapel.

Tintoretto, he admits, once left him cold: “I used to dislike him. It’s painting by numbers. There’s a system to it,” he laughs. And as I look at the old Renaissance canvas, I am not entirely sure what he means.

“There is something in English paintings I like,” he says nodding at both of us. “Maybe this is off track but I think (Walter) Sickert is an interesting painter. There’s awkwardness and stubbornness.” I am surprised to hear Sickert’s name coming from Tuymans; he was a British painter often sidelined in the canon, but a personal favourite painter of mine. The distortion and unease in both their works are there to be recognised now he has flagged it.

He leads us away from the side room and my brother takes his photograph, leaving me alone to contemplate his work. I had always looked for a deeper meaning to the image, but the truth is Tuymans doesn’t want to reveal it. He leaves us in a space of the unknown. He is a painter full of confidence and instinct, someone who has seen it all and done it all. What I have gathered is that whether it’s shown in a white cube or a church, he just loves painting. And that’s a good thing because as far as I am concerned he is the best painter alive today.

He comes back and says he needs a smoke. We take that as a cue that it might be our time up. We thank him for his time and leave him ripping a smoke at the entrance to the basilica.

As we head toward St. Mark’s Square, we hear a roar — a new Pope has been announced. The timing feels uncanny, as if the unveiling of Tuymans’ paintings at San Giorgio Maggiore had quietly ushered in a new chapter for the Church.