Luc Tuymans has painted a discarded apple so that the side with the bite taken out of it is balanced on a gray line—the horizon. It is seen from an almost unreal perspective, as if under a magnifying glass, and one becomes uncertain whether it is a skull, an atomic cloud, or something else. The image comes from a photograph found in a police archive that shows an apple dropped by a perpetrator at the scene of a murder. From the indentation, the physiognomy of the murderer could be reconstructed, and, thus, he was apprehended.

When one has been sensitized to this macabre aspect, one can feel it