One of the less remarked-upon artistic phenomena of the last
decade or so is the way the recent vogue for painting from
photographs has ushered in a mini-era of narrative painting. As
soon as the viewer becomes aware that a given work is a painting
of a photograph, his attention is necessarily directed to the
story
and away from the paint,
perceptions, and aesthetic concerns of the artist. The Belgian
painter Luc Tuymans stands at the forefront of a younger
generation of representational artists, almost all of whom paint
photographs, magazine clippings, film stills, and images from
television. “Mwana Kitoko,” Tuymans’s recent show at
Zwirner, brought together ten works using images from the
history of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. Meaning “beautiful
boy,” “mwana kitoko” is the nickname the Congolese gave to King
Baudouin during his 1955 triumphal procession through the
country.
Previously, Tuymans has not tended to paint historical or
politically charged subjects; he has generally focused on images
of people or landscapes. Still, the canvases
in “Mwana Kitoko”
have the same overexposed or washed-out and watery look of his
previous efforts. And, because the images in the show are all
taken from film stills and other archival material, they seem
distanced and unimpassioned, their political content muted. They
bear no relationship to the political romanticism of a Delacroix
or to the officially sanctioned politics of a neoclassical
painter such as David. In fact, Tuymans’s attitude toward his
subject matter remains ambiguous, and the cool