Dominating Luc Tuymans’s monographic show La Pelle (‘The Skin’), currently on view at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Schwarzheide, 2019, is the magnified reproduction of a seminal work of the same name that the artist made in 1986. Extended to a monumental scale and constructed entirely out of marble, this sumptuous mosaic was made to traverse the full expanse of the Palazzo’s ground foor, serving as a literal foundation - or skin - to the rest of the show. It is one of this year’s most striking artistic manifestations concurrent to the Venice Biennale, and was based on the eponymous painting – more than twenty years its elder – by virtue of its crucial subject matter and delicately understated rendition. Having resided in the same private collection since its execution, the original Schwarzheide, 1986, revels in momentous conceptual and visual signifcance, and posits as one of Tuymans’s most prodigious masterpieces. Delineating the soaring silhouettes of diffident pine trees against an off-white, faded background, Schwarzheide presents the viewer with an image that is both compositionally soothing and atmospherically ominous. Though at frst glance the painting’s invocation of natural elements conjures a passively peaceful atmosphere, – steeped in a withdrawn landscape devoid of geographic indicators – the void and silence that envelop the scene exude a more unnerving aura that betrays the heaviness of the composition’s subject matter. Taking its name after a World War II concentration camp,
Schwarzheide belongs to a cycle of works that Tuymans commenced in the latter half of the 1980s, touching on themes of loss and violence in the context of the Holocaust. Among these paintings, Tuymans’s chilling Gaskamer (‘Gas Chamber’), illustrating the horrifically ordinary setting of a death room, was displayed alongside the present work at the artist’s major 2004 solo exhibition at Tate Modern, as well as during Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, directed by Tuymans’s dear friend, Jan Hoet. More abstract and nondescript than the explicitly vicious Gaskamer, Schwarzheide is nonetheless replete with historic associations that compromise its seemingly simple and innocuous appearance. It presents the perspective of prisoners standing behind fences, looking outwards towards an unseeable, unreachable horizon, which itself provides a tragic echo to the similarly distant – if not entirely extinguished – realm of freedom situated beyond. While Schwarzheide’s discreet composition gives no precise indication of space and time, it nonetheless emanates a sense of familiarity that, through uncertain strokes and bilious tones, evokes the nostalgic aura of ancient documents. Culled from a contraband drawing made by Alfred Kantor – a concentration camp survivor whose published book of sketches has been a constant source of material for Tuymans – Schwarzheide lives as a reference to the drawings that captive Jews made in labour and concentration camps during the war.
‘I wanted to make my paintings look old from the start, which is important because they are about memory.’ Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans, Study for Schwarzheide, 1985, pencil on paper. © Luc Tuymans.
Alfred Kantor, Originial sketch done in Schwarzheide, 1945.