Eyeballs

Luc Tuymans rose to prominence as part of a European school of painters, championing figuration as a means to reflect a saturation of mass-media in a tense millennial world. In the present work, two rows of eyes, uncanny in their recontextualisation, return the gaze of the viewer with an unblinking transfixion. The naked alienation of each component emphasises what Hans Rudolf Reust has termed the ‘wound’ of Tuymans’ painting. ‘For the painter’, Reust writes, ‘the eye is the organ that is used to look at pictures, and thus the most vulnerable element of painting itself. Frontal, tightly framed within the image, the eye shows and sees itself in its dangerousness and as a source of danger. In the painted eye, the look comes back at the viewer: reflection begins in Tuymans’ painting through the active mirror of a returned look’ (H. R. Reust, ‘The Pursuit: Luc Tuymans 1996–2003’, Luc Tuymans, London, 1996 (2003 reprint), p. 235).

This work’s placement in a 2013 exhibition of Tuymans’ recent work resonated with a post-9/11 trauma. Sharing a stage with other works in a section of the show entitled Fortune, the work responded to what Tuymans dubbed an ‘attack on our own aesthetics’ (L. Tuymans, quoted in Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner, David Zwirner Gallery, London, 2013, p. 120). Raising crucial contemporary concerns associated with hazardous encounters, the threat of danger and the vulnerability of humanity, Tuymans’ Eyeballs is a vital visual metaphor for a disquieting time.