At once fgurative and abstract, familiar and uncanny, Michaël Borremans’ Untitled, 2008, serves as a poignant portrait of a collective human unconscious. An anonymous young woman appears as if in a state of sleep paralysis, lips sealed shut, body restrained by senseless immobility, wettened eyes fxated upon some unknowable vision. Her disturbance and fear are inefable; yet the scene feels intimately familiar. Most disconcerting of all is the painted mask which uniformly covers her face, breaking unevenly below her jawline. Materialising the power of silence, Borremans draws the viewer in with mystical force. Referencing Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet and Diego Velázquez in an exquisite treatment of paint, the artist crafs a composition that is self-conscious in its dialogue with the past whilst simultaneously maintaining an air of defance. ‘Borremans embraces tradition’, Michael Amy elucidates, ‘and then seizes the proverbial rug, and pulls it from under its feet’ (Michael Amy, quoted in Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, exh. cat., BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2014, p. 284). Presenting an elusive subject matter in the guise of fguration, Borremans introduces an art which successfully evades the defnitive nature of categorisation and interpretation. In Untitled, the oscillatory play between abstraction and fguration is expertly exploited in his rendering of the girl’s neck and upper chest, which dissolve in detail until he achieves a state close to a near-complete blur – splotches and lines of monochromatic paint that, when isolated in the lower segment of the painting, produce no coherent image. As our eyes journey upwards, however, the legibility of the fgure increases with the implementation of additional painterly detail; the colour palette is enriched, the fguration is enhanced, the painting appears as if transforming from two-dimensional space into three. To achieve such a dramatic technical transition in the space of a single canvas is no small feat. Yet Borremans achieves this with such fuidity and transience that we barely notice it has occurred.
The uniform mask of white is disrupted only by two red circles adorning the protagonist’s cheeks, akin to those worn by clowns, or painted upon the wooden surfaces of ventriloquist dolls. Such comparisons conjure a sense of the sinister that, once recognised, saturates the work. The victim/perpetrator duality is shared by the subjects in Cindy Sherman’s Fairy Tales and Disasters series, as well as Gerhard Richter’s harrowing Tote (Dead) paintings. Thus, the preconceived innocence and fragility of the subject is disrupted by the mask she wears, as Borremans presents us with a troubling paradox; a subject who is somehow simultaneously threatened yet threatening, terrifed yet terrifying. As Natalie King notes, Borremans’ fgures are ‘unsettling, eluding comprehension. The painted fgure is beside the point, more absent than present, an object to be posed and deciphered like a riddle’ (Natalie King and Diana d’Arenberg, ‘Michaël Borremans in Conversation’, Ocula, 17 April 2018, online). A misty haze hangs over the present painting, conjuring an otherworldly atmosphere tinged with a permeating sense of ambiguity. Opposing the highly contrasted chiaroscuro of Old Masters, Borremans ofers a sedated, verging on monochromatic tonality which prescribes for the work a sense of liminality – as if the subject were caught between two states; consciousness and slumber, life and death, this world and the next. In her eternal stillness, Borremans’ subject resembles John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, 1851-52, a work which yearns for a richly devised narrative interpretation and inscription. Untitled, however, remains uniquely intangible and transient. Ultimately, Borremans’ Untitled can be read as an exercise in blurring the distinctive boundaries between pictorial truth and artistic illusion. The work enlivens our expectations of what painting can achieve; both stylistically, and symbolically. In the words of Borremans, paintings such as Untitled are ultimately ‘philosophical question[s] about what truth can be. And truth is just as much in the lie as in something straightforward or honest… in my work I want to give information in a way that’s clearly incorrect, not ftting, out of place. I think that’s more honest.’ (Michaël Borremans, quoted in Michael Herbert, ‘Michaël Borremans’, Art Review Asia, May 2015, online).
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London. Image: Tate, London.