Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans has reshaped figurative painting's relationship to screen-based images much as Gerhard Richter transformed its engagement with analog photography. Where Tuymans once drew his visual references from the television, he now draws them from the iPhone. For the painting chosen for his second TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, his phone captured one of its own historical ancestors: an analog telephone. The painterly highlights seem to echo this process, the light breaking across the screen from which the image was painted, yet they may also point to where the telephone itself stood: a museum, quite possibly behind glass.

The muted palette of Vilnius is as characteristic of Tuymans as the buried historical context his painting gives almost no sign of. The artist encountered the telephone at a museum dedicated to the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, while preparing an exhibition in the city. The building's own history is steeped in violence: it housed German occupiers in the First World War, then served as headquarters first for the Gestapo and later the KGB. A few years ago the museum drew sharp criticism for dwelling on this final chapter, and on the claim of a Soviet genocide of Lithuanians, while staying silent on Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust, which killed ninety percent of the country's Jewish population.

From this fraught setting, Tuymans takes the telephone and renders it useless. In place of the rotary dial sits a deep green abyss, partly obscured beneath heavy black brushstrokes that fall like redactions.