Luc Tuymans: The Orphan

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has been invited to create an ephemeral work in a rotunda located in the heart of the French painting collections, near the Flemish schools. A former royal residence turned museum, the Louvre is encrusted with decorations, created at all the great moments in its history by the greatest artists. The exceptional intervention by Luc Tuymans, completely unprecedented for the contemporary period, marks the return of the act of painting in and on the walls of the Louvre.

Composed of four fresco-painted panels, this work assembles three images representing the cleaning of a painter’s palette, loaded with pigments. As usual, Tuymans chose images that he has kept, sometimes for years, in his archives. Images from the media or gleaned from the Internet; photographed using a smartphone or an instant camera, they are worked on at length, interpreted, then suddenly restored through a rapid execution, here at the Louvre, directly on the wall.

“The Orphan” also testifies to the particular role of the museum as a school of vision, an inspiration for artists by artists, a place of copying in academic times and a territory of creation very much alive today. The panels representing the palette being cleaned or cleaned are joined by a fourth image, that of a work painted in 1990 and lost by the artist, entitled “The Orphan“, which gives its title to the cycle. It represents the back of a doll’s head and without attributes, a neck open to view.