Luc Tuymans

Six paintings from Luc Tuymans’s new series “Allo!,” 2012, are featured in his current exhibition at David Zwirner’s new London location. The final scenes of the 1942 film A Moon and Sixpence, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 eponymous story, provide the source material for these works. The tale and the film center on an English stockbroker who abandons everything for Tahiti and the life of an artist. Hence, Gauguinesque imagery appears throughout the show.

In comparison to his earlier work and to the other four paintings on view here, Tuymans’s paint handling in the “Allo!” series appears looser and his pencil traces are markedly more visible. His usual palette of bleached-out and bleary color takes on a higher chromatic range with reds and blues (probably in homage to the technicolor ending of the film). The jarring light and dark tonal contrasts make the images look as if they were lit from behind. In paintings such as Allo! V, for instance, which depicts exoticized women picking fruit, this luminous quality enhances Tuymans’s usual sense of detachment. Allo! V is a painting that is made from a filmic representation yet lacks a protagonist, which adds another level of irony.

The artist spoke recently of having seen this film in his thirties and it is possible that nostalgia is operative here, and not necessarily to the exhibition’s credit. The overall effect is that of a hastily assembled, schematic image, as if Tuymans were trying to prevent a memory from fading into history by transforming it into a solid object.