A brush with... Luc Tuymans

A Brush With is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the Arts and Culture Platform. Created by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg Connects lets you access museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand, download the app to access digital guides and explore a variety of content. Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the Art newspaper in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians, filmmakers and, of course, other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. And this episode is a brush with Luke Toymans, who's transformed the territory of painting in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Using photographs and images from film and other media, he tackles a breadth of subjects and motifs, including contemporary politics, cataclysmic historical events, art history and apparently banal everyday objects and environments with paintings that are redolent with atmosphere and poetic power. Luke's process of finding the images and deciding how to transform them is slow and precise and work through in various stages before it reaches the canvas where he makes the final piece in oil on a single day. In the resulting pictures, the motif can be veiled or bleak and sometimes close to abstract and he's used the term "authentic forgeries" to describe them. In this way, they articulate the elusiveness of representation through painting, a quality Luke has described as the medium's belatedness, as well as the subjective nature of experience and memory, both personal and collective. Luke was born in 1958 in Mortsell in Belgium. He studied painting in Brussels and Antwerp where he lives today, but arguably his most crucial educational experience was his study of art history at the Vry University in Brussels at the moment when he was experimenting with filmmaking. These dual aspects have proved hugely influential on his subsequent work. Luke is one of the most erudite of painters with explicit and subtle nods to a wealth of artists, filmmakers and photographers laced through his output. He's also proved an inspired curator of exhibitions on various art historical subjects, including an exhibition of his historical compatriot James Ensor at the Royal Academy in London. His connection to filmmaking, meanwhile, has proved enormously productive, both in individual paintings with distinctive approaches to cropping and framing and exhibition-making, where he structures the narrative of bodies of work and carefully sequences his material. Luke began to gain attention in the mid-1980s. His most famous piece of this period is Gas Chamber from 1986, a small canvas based on a photograph from the death camp in Dachau and deliberately banal in its CPU monochrome appearance, where the tiny details like the grill on the floor and holes in the ceiling can only hint at the horror of the subject. He made several paintings, in which he addressed the Holocaust over the course of many years, including Walk from 1989 based on a photograph of Nazi henchmen, in Berscht-Garden, close to where Adolf Hitler had a home in the Bavarian Alps, and their architect from 1998, an image of the Nazi architect Albert Schberg on a ski slope. This latter picture was part of an exhibition in Berlin in that year, which was triggered by a telegram in which Spare reported to Hitler that he felt that the prisoners in work camps were given too much space before he himself went on a skiing holiday. Luke then painted several pieces exploring this theme in the context of what he called the Megalamaniac building site of Berlin at that time. Luke created a similarly coherent and provocative body of work for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, where he explored the violence of his native country's colonisation of Congo, and particularly the 1961 assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lemumba. But he consistently acts surprisingly and counterintuitively when he was expected to follow the Congo paintings with a similarly robustly political contribution to document in 2002, one of the most political and post-colonial editions of the German exhibition. He produced a huge canvas still live from 2002, which, as we'll hear, only a bleakly responded to global events. Since then, each group of paintings has reflected in different ways the singularity, curiosity, and often the sadonicism of Luke's vision. The series Forever, The Management of Magic from 2008, explores with ethereal almost spectral luminosity how the Walt Disney Company represents more than just entertainment, instead focusing on it as a purveyor of an ideology, through depictions of particular attractions to a shadowy portrait of Walt Disney himself, two representations of drawings for Epcot, the company's experimental prototype community of tomorrow, in Florida. The group of works that formed the exhibition Allo, in London in 2012, took as their source the final technical scene of an otherwise black and white 1942 film The Moon and Sixpons. The film is based on Somerset Mooms' 1919 novel of that name, in which the plot is loosely based on the life of Paul Goge, and in Luke's hands the imagery became a fertile examination of everything from the romanticisation of exotic non-western locations and people in modernist art, to the representation of artists on film. It also offered the chance to deliberately disrupt his own characteristically muted palette and engage in a kind of ping pong of painterly representation. Other series of examined subjects as diverse Islamic state atrocities in the Middle East, which he explored via reflections on Goge's black paintings and his own early work, Diorama called Arena and a film he made of it, the murky water of a duck canal and flower parades in the Netherlandish town of Zundert, where Luke's mother was from. Individual paintings meanwhile have tackled images from a still of the television presenter and painter Bob Ross to atrocities in Ukraine. Recent projects are typical of Luke's ambitions as an artist and ability to confound his viewers. He's presented two vast works in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, which took the place of the great paintings by the Renaissance artist Tintoretto, which are being restored. Luke's paintings feature thermal lamps and a band performing in a bar in South Korea. And in a show at David's Werner in New York in 2025, and the gallery's outpost in Los Angeles in 2026, he addresses the current tumultuous and ominous situation in the United States when the exhibition The Flower Basket that includes one of his largest ever paintings, which represents the titular basket, yet evokes Theodor Gerikos, the raft of the Medusa from 1818 to 19, as well as pieces that blow up and transform stills of illuminated manuscripts to allude to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. As much as anything he's made in his long career, Luke's latest canvases possess a distinctive tone and mood, a strange and unsettling approach to colour and ambiguous meaning. And it says approach to his lifelong mediation of imagery through paint, with which I began our conversation. As I mentioned, he characterized his early intentions as to create an authentic forgery. So I asked Luke, does he still see that as a primary aim of his painting today? It was an idea that I had when I was 18. At that point, making a painting was like making an antique to a certain extent, so it was a way to work around the situation, but nevertheless the idea is still valid in a sense that there is this element of distrust towards the imagery that remains an element that is in play. And also the fact that I was very already then actually delving into, already represented imagery that was going to be reworked and going to be, I don't say reworked in a sense that it becomes and gets a different relevance, so in that sense there is still a shimmer of that probably. I wanted to talk about time in relation to that, because one of the things that seems that's extraordinary about your achievement is that you build time into the paint somehow, that yes, they're made right now, but somehow there is a complex relationship with time built into the way that you make the works, the physical works. Can you say something about that? Yes, first of all, before I start to paint, it's a very difficult process in the sense that the painting itself is something that's actually done very fast in the sense, the execution of the painting, but before doing that, the conceptualising of a show or imagery or finding imagery is something that takes a long, long time and goes through a process of drawing borrow colors, my eye film, working with a computer, whatever you can take off to come to actually finalize the imagery. By the time I start painting, I don't want to think on the canvas like some painters do, I actually then want my intelligence to go to my hands. And that is a specific nervousness, which is actually extremely intentional and extremely important. I mean, so there are two different practices in a certain sense and there are two different points of intelligence in the way. You say it's a difficult process. Can you give us an insight into the two-ing and throwing, if you like? The painting medium is a meme that works over time, through time, with time in a certain extent. It has an element of belittness in not only its perception, but it also in what it means in terms of a signifying and how it actually sort of makes a metaphor or how it creates something of an image that you can contemplate. So in that sense, it has to sort of hold its own ground to a certain extent. And some imagery, like even the last image of the last show, let's say, that goes already back two or three years. So in our images that actually go back further, they become relevant at a certain stage. It's a certain moment. It's like you have a sort of data bank of images and then you start to conceptualize and see what actually is relevant at the moment. There are things that I painted that I would have never painted years ago for a couple. Yeah. But would you have had some of those images many years ago and just like being intrigued or engaged with them, but not known what to do with them, as it were? Exactly. So it's the thing. But when I come across an image that sort of is to me, to a certain extent, not to be understood, that's already a way to key the imagery, I mean, to become interested in it and to save it to a certain extent. And sometimes these things become relevant or not, I mean, it depends. Yeah. You've referred to that process as difficult there. And I know that in the past, you've said it's painful, that kind of search for images. Can you tell us a bit more about that? As you say, it's very, very multifarious, there's different sources. First of all, I mean, it's not like you have one type of work that I keep on working on to a certain extent. Not that that's a problem, but if you could have an example, for example, you have the most straightforward evolution of an artist like let's say Robert Reiman or Ellsworth Kelly or all those people that you can take off. But I don't have the patience for that. So every show also, not only every painting has to be okay and hold is on ground, but every show is also kind of a concept, it's like a hole that comes together, which is probably something that I inherited because I work with the medium film for a certain extent of time and that have sort of informed the practice, it also informed the practice in terms of how you look at imagery and how you perceive it and how you distance yourself from it. For me, the element of distance is the most important thing, there's something that people were also to a certain extent feel and therefore sometimes they will have the element of anemia or they have the element of a lack of empathy or all those things that you can see because there is this distance that is building from the start. And that might be actually the only remalitions of this authentic forgery. That's where we can actually make the leg. There's a really intriguing notion you discussed quite a few years ago actually with Kerry James Marshall where you said that you want to find a kind of route into the work and you described it as a weak spot through which you can enter an image. Can you say a little bit more about that? What do you mean by a weak spot? Every interesting artwork that I look at and most specifically when it comes to painting there, there must be an element of a flaw, there must be an element of something that is to a certain extent meant to be and to a certain extent a mistake or an accident to. And this is the way to which you can actually enter the imagery. This is like you have an armour and there's a certain point where the armour breaks to a certain extent. And I think that's a very valid point. I mean, except for going for extreme perfection, but then we will end up with Jan van Eyck. Right, exactly. But in other words though, I think that the distance is also a window for your audience. If you didn't have the distance, the audience might not find their route into the work in the same way, I think. Yes, I also think it's, I mean since I'm a contemporary artist and contemporary art, if you look at it in terms of how art has been produced, shown and all those things, we have become democratic inmost convictions. So in that sense, there is already something that's compromised to a certain extent. Therefore I think most of the artists nowadays, also even when making the work, have kind of a notion who is going to look at it and what the perception of it will be. It's in that sense already deluded to be honest. So therefore the important thing of the distance is also the viewer is nevertheless the person that finishes the work off to a certain extent. And I think the distance and the measurement between the image and the viewer is very important. And that is why, for example, a lot of my work, seen from a certain distance, I also work with a mirror, a lot of artists actually do that because it's interesting to then check the image with doubling your distance. But it also gives you a different perception of what you're actually doing at that point. And in that sense, it's sort of like this, this element of distance and the measurement of it is that when you see the painting from afar, it sort of like makes sense when you come close to the painting, it sort of disintegrates. Yes, that disintegration's crucial, isn't it? You mentioned about how you work in series or rather you work on a show as a concept. I love this idea that you said that you'd complete a painting that kind of puts a lid on the whole subject, if you like. There's a final painting that adds up to a kind of crowning image for that sequence of images. You talked about how you plan for shows in advance and then make the paintings. Do you know exactly the makeup of the show, therefore, do you know what that final execution of the work will be that puts the lid on that sequence of work? It depends. It's various. It's not that straightforward, but I mean, it's a lot of work to just combine them, but I also then start to organize one image after the order. And in that sense, create nearly a sequence, which to a certain extent, again, is this film make element that's sort of inherited into the work. And then actually try to finalize it with a last image. So we have the beginning, the middle and the end, to a certain extent. And probably every show that I've did. So I mean, given understanding, when I did my first show in '88 in the gallery circuit, there were about 150 works behind my back. I mean, an already extremely censored, I mean, a lot of them were destroyed. So there was a censorship that already had been done to what should survive and what not. Also economically in terms that I overpainted a lot of paintings, because I didn't have money to buy canvas and things like that. So I also destroyed a lot of good things. But anyway, from only that first show, there were 15 paintings picked out of those 150. But since then, every show has been a show that's been made as a show. Also, galleries shows are important for me in a sense, because not just a shop, but it's actually where you first initially show the new work. Yeah, absolutely. The way that you've described making a painting feels like there's an enormous amount of tension, because I think you said that, you know, if you take one full step right at the end of the process, it can destroy the entire work. Yeah. So, in that circumstance, will you destroy the painting then, or will it be scraped clean and you start again? Well, in the former case, in the old days, I would overpainted, because as I said, it's a money problem. But nowadays, of course, I can afford to throw it away and actually either start again or not, or take it up much later, which also happened. Right. I mean, there's been a moment where I had to paint one image, like, ten times in order to get exactly what I wanted to have. But it's interesting that if you're going to make a painting in a single day, as you say, you do that idea that you're doing that, but you're using oil, which is a slow-drying medium, is in a way you're putting yourself on the line. It seems to me that that's important, in a way, you know, that you're always pushing yourself to the limit when you do this, and that sort of tension or that kind of precarity or risk is crucial to what we end up with in terms of the painting. Well, most importantly is that, when a painting works, it should come across as effortless. It should come across as natural. The more a painting is worked, the worse it is. It's a very tedious process, I mean, up until, let's say, three first hours of the process, it's sheer hell, although I do know what I'm doing, of course, seeing the trajectory I've already been through, but still then, it still remains this problem that every time I start is the question, if I can still do it. Every time it works, it still amazes me that it actually worked. So when that's no longer the case and I just go to do a job, then it's probably not longer of any importance. That's also why I paint alone in my studio with new music, with new assistants. So it's a very intentional practice, in a sense. And in terms of when you're working through the subject matter, you've talked about memory as being a crucial element of the work. And I love this idea that you said that you asked the public if we're so full of our own contemporary anity, do we still need memory? But of course, there are so many different textures of memory, right? So you can bring memory in in many different ways, and it might be through your own autobiography at times, or it might be a remembered image from a particular event or whatever. So memory can perform many, many different functions in the work, right? Yeah, it can. But it always, in a certain extent, when it comes to me, it has to be relevant, so it has to be specific. So it's just not that at random. The remark that I made with the contemporary rarity and being full of it and that need of a memory is actually what we're living, basically. So in a sense, you see a reduction of knowledge. And you see also a reduction of relevance, not in the least in the art world. So this is where the fight comes in, and the idea of resistance is ultimately important to keep on doing that. Also all the artists that I admire were always artists that took on a specific position within the framework of what they were doing. And in terms of how you work with contemporary subjects, one of the ways in which again you open a window for your audience, it seems to me, is through these unusual roots into subject matter. So for instance, the classic example being still life from 2002, and you'd been in New York when 9/11 happened and so on, and that was a kind of response. But it was, as you pointed out, it was in some ways a political painting. And so it's about finding ways to frame a subject or to frame a thought, right, that allows us an entry into it, but isn't too on the nose to, in some ways, prevent the audience gaining a kind of foothold in the painting. No, the important thing is the idea of understatement. Understatement is actually something that comes pretty close to the element of the way a painting actually should work, should be understatement. And that particular example was, yeah, where we were in New York, we saw in the hotel room all the planes going into the building from all the different sites, people jumping out of the building, which was horrific. So I don't think you could do anything with it. So we're thinking about something which would be the complete opposite, which would be the idea of the idyllic, to a certain extent. And then the lowest denominator of painting, which is the still life, which was also the loophole for Suzanne. And that's where I came up with my memory of a painting of Suzanne, which is far smaller than the one that I painted, which was painted on the left white. So it's sort of got a bluish shine through the time. And then when I got home, I actually made my own still life and then blew it up and took down a little bit the contrast so it looks like a projected image and something larger than life that you could no longer consume. So it became an apolitical, and therefore a very political painting. You mentioned scale there, again, that seems to me to be absolutely crucial in how you address your subject matter. And often it's counterintuitive and therefore more impactful for that very reason. For instance, gas camera is quite a small painting, even despite the fact that it is probably the most meaningful of all subjects, you know, dealing with the Holocaust. So it seems to me that you approach scale in a very deliberately, very thoughtful way, which might be counterintuitive to your audience. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is that scale is something extremely important. In the beginning, of course, I painted on canvas that I bought that was already on a frame. But very, very fast, I started to work on just canvas like nailed on a wall so that I still that a very last moment could change the image, even when it was just millimeters or small. But so, so, virtually none of my paintings have the same size. Then there's also the point that for me, it's pretty clear that the painting can be small and therefore doesn't mean it is less monumental and a very big painting can be less monumental. So these are all these things that work. And it's also interesting when I did my first show at David Swerner in '94, there was a couple that left from LA and saw the work and since the work was small, they thought it was some kind of folk art. So this is also interesting when you go to the stage and you crawl into their format, which is the misunderstanding the Germans have about a format with this kind of parallels with the Americans in terms of the megalomania of their intentions. So that's where you make the joke and the ultimate joke. So yeah. But I suppose it's also dealing with art world or painterly taboos, right? So if you're going to make a painting about a certain subject in art history, it has to be on a grand scale. So in a way, you're confronting conventions and wanting to upturn them. Yeah, but it's also that some paintings have to be or have to have a certain size and others don't. And yet again, the distance here is important. I mean, a small painting from a distance that are small paintings that I've made that you can see from a mile away. So in that sense, it depends on how the attention span works. And with me, as also with the viewer to a certain extent. And therefore, every painting has to have the right size. I have to sort of feel the size. And during the making of the process is also the making of the size of how big it is. Of course, I have it in my head approximately. But the real size only comes about during the process. Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Who was the first artist who's worked you loved? Well, the first artist that made an impression on me was kind of unlikely. But it was when I was 12 years old when I went by uncle to the museum in Denhaag and I saw a Mondria. Ah, how amazing. And I didn't understand it, but I knew it was important. And it was a small painting in a diamond shape with just two black lines. And I immediately sort of reverberated to me that that was something special, but I couldn't know why that was special. So that was when the very first shocks show to speak. One that was important too was maybe, no, I may not know, is Leon Spilliard, which I mean, I also created the show of Endsor with one premise that they would also do a show of Spilliard which they then did in the Royal Academy. Ah, so you were influential on the fact that that show happened. I see, okay. Yeah, because they were contemporaries, but of course, Pilliard was younger and also even less known than James Endsor in England, to a certain extent. There are many more artists, of course. But when we go to England, then we could make a choice like Walter Sikert, David Nash. So in that room of people, and for example, the Scottish that would be… Rayburn? Rayburn, right. Rayburn, because I also saw that as a young kid, the portrait of the slave owner, which actually is owned by the museum in Ghent, which was amazing for me to see how fast it was painted and how direct and how extremely precise that was made. When you were 12 and you saw Mondrian, did you have a concept there of what being an artist was and whether you wanted to be one? No, none at all. No. I did, of course, with I threw a lot, I mean, I know that was an ability I had, having been a kid that had been bullied in school for a long time. And since my parents, my mother was Dutch, my father was from the flounder from Antwerp, but there was always sent to these sort of… on holiday in Holland. And there were these things like… they did something like the Tour de France, which was like two weeks. You had to run and all those things. But there was also a big square on which 150 kids would make a chalk drawing. And that's when I won the yellow sweater that I had to put on for my group. So that's… I was six then and I thought, this is what I'm going to become. So not knowing, of course, about an artist is. Right. But that's fascinating that you had that ability to draw on it in a way you decided the destination of your career. Which historical artist do you turn to the most today? Many, of course. But there is one huge misunderstanding which should be taken care of. When I was doing the wall paintings in Deluver, you had all these people trying to ask me where the Joconda was, so I sent them in the opposite direction, so they had to go to three quarters of Deluver to see it. At the same time, they had restored the painting of the Charles Soudier, of Van Eyck, which I think is a bit more interesting than the entirety of Da Vinci's career. So that is probably the trauma I have been born with from the region where I come from because I also saw that as a kid and actually thought we can actually forget it. And this is also probably one of the most favourite paintings that actually is in London, in the National Gallery, which is the Arno Finis, which is the one I would take with me. Because it's a mysterious painting and it is also the first moment where actually although artists, as artists, as we know, didn't exist, Van Eyck had a sort of stance to him where he made clear he was virtually the person who initiated this imagery by putting his name under the convex mirror. It was a painting that travelled to Spain, so it must have had an impact on even Velázquez when he came to Las Meninies. And you see the opening of the frame, it's a very modern concept of a work and it's unforgiven. So this is also where I come from in terms of a region being overrun by many different powers and at the same time that element of realism, which is really important to me. I know you said that after Van Eyck, you're all dilettoned, basically, that somehow, because he reached the summit, everything that follows him in some way cannot match it. But in a way that's liberating as well as a kind of pressure, right? Of course you should not try to monkey that and of course not that's impossible. I mean, it's also not necessary. I mean, it's a market also put huge question marks next to that endeavor of Van Eyck. I mean, he had a very interesting motto, which is, if I can, which actually was, I pretend to be big on humility, but behind that, I have the most gigantic ambition. Right. Yeah. I wanted to talk about Jericho, because of course there's the work in your current show, which is very directly literally the exact scale of the Raftan Imageso and of course takes that composition. Can you say about why that you wanted to make the fruit basket in that way? Did you take an image of a fruit basket and it happened to look like the Raftan Imageso or was it the other way around? Tell us how you. It's a bit both ways. I mean, this image came about by accident because I was for a specific project that never came to fruition with the writers of Ili, which is an Italian writer and a man of research of filmmaker and somebody out of theater and an actor, and we were going to do something about Malapasta, but not lapilla, but kaput. They didn't come to fruition, but we were there to also finally meet in Capri and at the Villa Malapasta. But at the same time, Mark Mendelssohn was the writer and American writer von Disprice, which is a prize he gave every two years, the Malapasta literary prize. And the day before he got the real prize, like in an official sense, he had to give a sort of small talk and a small space, actually, where he had a screen that consisted of night panels behind his back when which he saw this fruit basket in a highly defined blue. The next morning, he actually had to hold the fruit basket, which goes back to Malapasta himself, which is fermented fruit and give it back. So that, in itself, was something that stuck to me and then when I was doing and working in the Louvre and then standing in the front of the redoes of Jericho, I saw the diagonal, that's one thing. Then you have the idea of rotten fruit. You have the idea of corpses that were completely decomposing. And then also the fact that you don't realize that that painting is so big, that large when you're in front of it, because most of it is a mass in the center. And that gave me the idea to make this. So in fact, this painting that I've made for the show as a meaning in that sense, because it's about the element of decay, but it's also about decay, which is sort of built into digital light to a certain extent, because the image gives light. It is heightened blue. It is something that you gift somebody that is sick and the United States starts to resemble a fruit basket. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Again, it's so interesting that you're making a still life effectively when you're making a comment on American society, American politics. There's a nice circularity with the still life painting in a way. Yeah, it's actually also interesting that, for example, a person like Susanna was like the father of modernism, or modernism, if you could put it in that sense, actually found out that type of aggression was the one he actually could feather himself into. Because my students forget that the early works of Susanna were actually extremely cruel or extremely violent to a certain extent. They were about rape, they were about mutilation. Maybe it's passive-aggressive, I don't know, but they all condensed that into this fruit, which I found interesting. There's also the later works before he died with discolors, which were stacked one on top of the other one as a still life. So that's what I always found interesting. So this type of sort of twist that comes into play that is not visible at the first glance. Right. So in your current show, which I believe is going to Los Angeles as well, you have a body of work, which is called the illumination series, which relates directly to images of illuminated manuscripts, but you're framing it to a certain extent in relation to Rothko. Can you tell me about that association? Yes, I've always been fascinated by Rothko and I still am because I think, first of all, powerful artists coming from Ukraine, I mean, it's also not to be mistaken. I mean, when he did his travels to Europe, that was also eye-opening for him. But this is the painter of the portal, I mean, the portal. And painterly, in terms of color and what he actually achieves, especially in the Sea Grand Paintings, especially the ones that are in London, which I think are one of the best works that he ever made. There is this element of a depth into the painting that I find. But as I said, the portal is really important. And so, when I was working on this imagery and delving into this image of this manuscript, which I then enlarged and enlarged and enlarged, I actually saw them on my iPhone with dark, dark space around it and also not straight. They were like completely sort of twisted and the torn to one side of the other. And I found this image of Rothko in his studio with a painting "Leans Against the Wall" in a certain angle. And that made me sure to paint that sort of dark space around it, which is nearly as important as what you see. And it also lits up the entirety of the imagery, yet again, going to that light that comes out of an iPhone or that is digitalized, which is modern light, which was actually the first I was able to captivate that. And those were made before the big blue painting of the fruit basket. Right. There is of course the reminiscence through the day and age in which Rothko lived, which is also very conspiratorial and was also kind of extremely fucked up when it comes to social politics. And then, of course, you have all these people that now are going back to abstract expression even with splattering paint around, which makes no sense whatsoever. And therefore, I think it must be interesting to make something which was meticulously made and which was actually calculated through the brim. Right. And then the Middle Ages. So it's a very complex show. It's actually a very sad show, to be honest. Right. When you say sad, what do you mean? But because the show is about the huge dissolution of what we are living right now in terms of having always been somebody who has believed in a multicultural, pluralistic world, and you now see the reduction of everything, to a certain extent, that where it becomes exceedingly vulgar. I mean, that's probably something I still have to come to terms with. So, that show was also dealing with that, to a certain extent, because not that the show is mocking anything or the United States for that matter, because the state has been very good to me. So, that's not the point. I'd be having a lot of friends there. So, in that sense, it has an element of sadness. It also seems to me that a reference to Rothko inevitably conjures the notion of what he felt art could do or wanted it to do versus what you think it might be possible to do. You talk about sadness, that's very interesting in the light of Rothko's high aims, literally wanting people to cry in front of his pictures and so on. There is a sense in which Rothko's aims for painting, even amid that very complex political moment, were kind of as high-minded as you could get in terms of what painting could achieve, right? So, I wondered if it was a reference to that too. To the fact that that didn't really work, but that it doesn't work whatsoever, that's one thing, but on the other hand, the thing is that the persistence of Rothko, which is to a certain extent for me, although it's in the framework of this miglomaniac sort of projection that was made by a covert operation by the CIA, it's all interesting. But apart from that, I think it's very un-American work to assess, but I mean, it comes across as coming from somewhere else to a point. And it's hard felt, and it's overly romantic. But yeah, so this is a juxtaposition to that. Right. You've recently done this extraordinary project in Venice, where your paintings took the place of the great interretos in the San Giorgio Maggiore, while they are being restored. Tell us about that because, of course, you're not in any way attempting to compete with interretto, but again, you're working on a scale that directly responds to his work. But I'm just intrigued by what extent his works were in your mind when you were making those two paintings. This happened because these people from San Giorgio Maggiore came to my office and then asked me to do that, and I asked them the time frame, which was a month, so I said, are you nuts? Because it's like, what, this is four by six meters. But then I had an idea, so I actually then found them and said, well, I will do it, and I did it in two weeks. So after two weeks, they were in my studio and they were kind of amazed that that worked. And I always liked interretto in the sense that he's also a little bit the odd man out within the Renaissance and the way he actually perceived this imagery. And the imagery has an element of directness within the touch and how it is painted. And so in that sense, I thought it also enabled me to make something that had nothing to do with religion, for example. Not that the works have to do with religion, but they do it in a specific way, especially those two paintings that are there. And the diagonal he made and the way he actually also portrays the last supper and things like that are kind of indefinite within even the time frame, he made that. That was a sort of challenge to do. And the two imagery, I also told them they were not religious, and I also said when they came from. So one image is actually something that I saw that's specifically a wife is also an artist and she was in the Busan Biamill. And there was this very lousy in the hotel bar, there was this very lousy, it was a two-group band that was playing, that was mirrored into the wall and distorted because of that. And again there, I had the remalitions to Walter Sikert in that imagery, the disintegration of the figures. And the other thing was a heating lamp, the heating lamp because churches are cold. And so I said, if you want to give it a religious idea, the heating lamp could be held and actually the musicians could be purgatory, itself. And it's interesting you took about Sikert because Sikert is an example of an artist who used very unusual colors, even within his own milieu. He was a very individual colorist and it seems to me you are too. I wonder have you looked at Sikert's colors particularly, have they directly influenced you? They have not directly influenced me, but the influence came later when I saw remaniscences to what he was actually doing in the way he was painting. And also the days he made his paintings, it's a kind of dark to a certain extent. I mean, there is a darkness in this ever which was kind of pessimistic to a point, which I can kind of adhere to. I even recognize such to a certain extent, I mean the way how he actually paints which I found quite interesting. A brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg, connects the free arts and culture platform. Bloomberg connects offers access to more than 1200 organisations through a single click. New Guides are added regularly and recent editions include S. Devlin's exhibition Congregation, which features large-scale, chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement from their homelands. This projection-mapped, tiered sculpture is being shown at the Perelman Performing Arts Centre or PAC in New York until the 4th of January 2026, explore more on PAC-NYC's guide available on Bloomberg Connects. You'll also find a number of museums across the world that have had major presentations of Luke Timon's work from in the UK, Tate and the Toolbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in the US and in Europe, the Hamburg Bahnhof in Berlin and Bozer in Brussels to explore digital guides to all the popular institutions, download the app today. It's available from the App Store and Google Play and you can keep up to date by following Bloomberg Connects on Facebook and Instagram. Which contemporary artist do you most admire? When it comes to painting, I mean, they're all friends of mine. What comes to mind is my lens of mouth, which I think is one of the most powerful painters on the globe. And Kerry James, who has this beautiful exhibition now as a Royal Academy, which are all standing friends of mine, then there's also Pierre Wieck, which I admire, which is not a painter, but for me, it's actually on a pictorial level as important as a painter. I agree with you. He has a brilliant formal sensibility as well as being a great conceptual artist. Yeah, I mean, he probably hates that, but I think it is true. There is no painting in France except Pierre Wieck, just that he doesn't paint, but okay. So in that sense, I think that those are kind of different landmarks. San Douglas was also somebody I'd met, many, many, many other people, of course, but. I wanted to ask you about the work by you called Idle after a work by Carla Arotchik. Carla is your wife, right? So I thought that was a very touching, but in actually a really beautiful painting of yours. Can you tell me something about what prompted you to make a work after her? First of all, it's not easy for another artist to be married to an artist, especially a monster. So in that sense, it's a tribute to my wife, and in her perseverance in her own career, which is not easy. No, indeed. What do you have pinned to your studio wall? Nothing, basically. At the moment, the studio is empty now, because the work is gone, and I'm working on a manuscript for these Italians, because they also have a book of manuscripts, which I'm trying to fill up now with watercolors, and that's the last thing I'll do this year. Right. You talked about how you work through an idea or an image with drawings and watercolors and so on. When you're making the final painting, are those on the wall next to the painting or are they just in your mind? No, no, they're present, yeah. I mean, everything that's available that has been made that could be of any importance to the production of the work is there to look at. And do you also keep, because you talk about making bodies of work, do you keep everything around you that will be part of that body of work in a way as a kind of comparison or a way of seeing how the work your painting fits in with that group and slots in? Yes, exactly. I mean, so it's only when the show is completely finished, all the works are put on a frame, and I've been photographed, then they will leave, and not before. It's also something I learned, because in the beginning of my career, I was always a year ahead with the shows, because I'm also not a pre-modernist, so I always keep my deadline. And then my former director came to my studio and needed some works for the art fair, and they took three works out, and so my whole show was fucked up. So, from then on I said, I will make work for the art fairs, and I will make my show. So I make two different things so that they will never interfere. That's interesting. When you make a work for an art fair, does it differ at all in terms of, do you approach it differently from the subject matter point of your work? Yes, because it's a singular work or it's singular works. They are somehow related to what I'm thinking at that moment, what could be relevant or not, but it has a different stance. I mean, it doesn't have the same priority, let's put it that way as a show. Which museum do you visit most frequently? We're losing a museum and Antwerp, so. Yes, yeah, this is a major thing. So basically the Belgian government is completely reorientating the museums in Belgium, so that SMAC will get the collection that's currently in Antwerp, right? Yeah, which is insane, because also that museum is not up to it. They're trying to save money, and it's been actually disguised as a huge sort of reorganization of the cultural landscape, which is not true. But we're fighting it still, hoping that the first museum of contemporary art ever built in Belgium will remain the museum of contemporary art, which is we cannot degrade the museum to an art center. So, yeah, that's unfortunate. But what museum do I visit the most? I mean, the museum that I actually visit the most is probably the Prada. Yeah, it's an extraordinary museum. Obviously, the black paintings have been tremendously important, and they in terms of those works like the Shaw and the Arena, those sequence of paintings that you made. I mean, will you go when you go there? Will you seek out the black paintings, because you just have to see them again? Yes, I will. I mean, it's like old friends, I will actually go looking. No, it's also interesting, because it took a long time for me to understand Goya to a certain point, because first of all, I always admired Velázquez, and I still do, because he's extremely fabulous painter, which had a lesson or two by Rubens when he was there for six months. So, we also have to understand the connection between where I come from and Spain. We had the huge connection of only in terms of the sort of rule over us, but there was also the huge cultural connection, as there is probably also with Rubens and Van Dyke with London, because actually before they went, you were living in the Middle Ages. So, in a sense, this visual trajectory is kind of interesting, and Velázquez was, of course, the element of up, down, you know, your basically ship in front of the paintings of Velázquez, and Goya is from the bottom up, and it's uneven, and that's what makes it extremely annoying. So, therefore, I tend to go now more for Goya, because he's more uneven, and also the fact that he was living there, and actually the enlightenment stopped at the Pyreneea, and he was deaf, and in his isolation he created all that. So, that element of resilience, and also the fact that he made the first political painting, or one of the first ones, which was to save his neck, basically, because, of course, he had contact with French officers and the enlightenment, and to in order to save his neck when the king came back, he painted two paintings, which was the resistance in Madrid, and then, actually, the Lostres de Mayo, where you have the execution, where the famous X comes in play, and that is a painting that had a humongous impact on Manet, and even Jeff Wall. So, to that extent, that's important here. I mean, also, it's the old master on the verge of modernity, to a certain extent, I think. Yes, and in fact, that's born out by how many artists that come onto this podcast talk about Goya, he's almost a sort of contemporary artist, weirdly. It's incredible how often he comes up. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world? Well, changed my life into a certain extent is that my parents who squabbled, they came from two different directions where it comes to the world, and it had a huge impact. It was a marriage, which was, like, not happy. So, during dinner time, there was always this moral stance to who was right, wrong in that specific period. And it created a phobias, which I then investigated later by these visiting places, like Auschwitz and so on and so on, which had an impact in terms of looking at the world to a point where you see a denominator and where you can see the point that how things have changed. That was one particular event. The other event was probably also the event of 9/11 to a point, because that's where the point where I actually understood and my wife too, and she said it to me, that the world would change after that. And it definitely did up until the point we are now. Yeah, absolutely. Just to go in a bit more detail about the point about your parents. I mean, I always thought it was very interesting that there was an autobiographical reason why ultimately you've made so many paintings which relate to war. So your mother's side was dutch, your father's side was from Flanders, right? And your mother's side were in the resistance and your father's side were in some way more collaborative. Well, they were sent as kids by the mother to German schools, and one of the brothers was sent to the Adolf Hitler Schule in Finstinger to become a cowlite, and my father was sent to Poland to a farm. The other one, which I named after, was actually killed when he was 16 as a mascot of a SS troop in Steteam. Right. So there is that, and then there's a brother that was lost on the other side by the dutch. And so in that sense, there was always this sort of moral adjustment to what was played out mostly during dinner time. And this created this phobia, that's the autobiographical part, the bigger part is that this is exactly the moment that actually the empire, as we can think of, in terms of Europe, dissolved, the colonies dissolved, and the psychological breakdown was the Holocaust, which leads us all the way back to the genocide in Palestine, to a certain point, but also the fact that I already knew from that start that working about this was quite difficult in the sense that it's not only controversial, but it's actually there is an element of morality that plays out with it, which is difficult. And therefore, it's a taboo, and therefore I also did it. And I saw there's a cornerstone of working with a history that sort of has a closeness, and in that sense was not just making art about art, but making art about what is consequential. And so, yeah, those were pretty important things, which took a long time to I sort of navigated around it a long time, until especially depending our new quarters, and then the gas chamber, and Shouat's idea. Because in fact, there's not a lot of them that directly turned to it, and seen the whole over of the 600 paintings, it's a very small amount of paintings. But they are kind of important, as corners don't see. Which writers all poets do you return to the most? That's a lot, but if you want to have really a piece of my mind, I had the ones to do a lecture, which was called curating the library, and people were thinking that I was going to come with images, and I didn't, I came with three books. And they were literally a piece of my brain. So you have like the ethics of Barra Spinoza. You have aesthetic dysphorcheins from Bloch, and you had life honored by a Dutch writer Janja Kolbislav. Now, if you pile those three together, then you have a piece of my brain. Right. And Slavhoff actually inspired the title of that show that he curated, which was at Boza and then in Beijing, right? Which was the Fibidnempire. One of the things I've noticed is it seems to me that literature appears in your work quite often through the titles. It often frames the work somehow. There are, but it also instigates a couple of ideas, like the show that I did in Wales, which was against the day, which is Thomas Pinchon's book. It was about that idea of imagery that was made within the other sense of a utopia. You had the first one with the Jesuit, which was an utopic element with a hidden agenda, then you had the forever the management of magic, which is Disney, which is detriment, and then you get the idea of against the day, which is where things are no longer real. Things are actually being made in a virtual world, on a virtual room. Right. And I always liked Thomas Pinchon, especially about the Crying of Lot 49, which is this little book that he wrote about the post and how the post was a secretive conspiratorial organization. And this is actually the beginning of internet before it existed. So this idea of the inventor of paranoia within American literature. Right. Fascinating. I also want to ask you about the L.O. paintings. And is it right that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was kind of a source for the L.O. paintings? Of course, they relate very specifically to the film of the Moon and Sixpons. But is it right that you were thinking also of Conrad when you made that body of work? Yeah, to a certain extent. But it was mostly the film because the film was a very bad film, a George Sanders scene. Like all these films about artists are kind of a mockery. But this one was especially one of the first they made. And then it was kind of interesting because in the end, the film is in black and white. It turns into color. And that's what I actually sort of shocked me when I saw the film. And when I first saw it and went back to it to make this series about it. It's also a joke on modernism because you see this doctor with the take German accent when the main character is already dead. And this spouse is like turning around in the sand, going into the hot and seeing these mockeries of Hollywood and sort of go-gam pictures. Yeah, just so I thought that was funny. What musical or other audio do you listen to while you're working? No. I've never bought a record in my life. So not a CD, nothing. So it's total silence every time. Right. And that's crucial in terms of concentration. Just you don't want any outside influence in terms of? In the old studio, I had a DJ that was living underneath. And when I was working, he was playing. So I just pay him to stop the music for the music. This point, I ask what other media influence your work? And obviously film has been tremendously important. I want to ask about that period where you made films. It seems to me that that was as important as anything that happened before that in terms of learning about art. And I know that you were studying art history while you were also making films. Is that right? So those two things seem to have channeled your thoughts really productively in terms of the painting. Absolutely. And also when I was studying in Brussels and there was still the possibility in the cinematic, which is no longer the case, where you had these sort of viewing rooms were completely in R.D. Go with arm chairs. And you could actually rent them out with a couple of people, which we did. And then actually you had the possibility to go to film history, like say from the silent movies all the way up. And that had a huge impact because it sort of changed my way of viewing and vision and what you could do with a film. And also the similarities that actually then eventually cropped up after the film adventure, which stopped because of financial problems in the first place. And secondly, because I was not able to write a script. And then when I had the script, then I saw that it was already filmed because I had the idea of making something that came close to Blue Velvet of David Lynch. And this was exactly the film I wanted to make, but in a different sort of setting, which was the settings of these after-war villas with straw roofs in which this sort of this whole incestuous violence was taking place. But yeah, that was already filmed. But the thing is that there is this element with film and painting that is similar. But while filming, even with a super 8-camera through the lens, you can add it in the lens. So I would be actually a very bad photographer because I would be not in the moment. Photographer is in the moment. And film and painting are about the approach. And those things are actually very similar. It's just really interesting that you mentioned David Lynch there, because I know there's the work called Still. There's also the other one which is the return, which is the guys in the staircases, which is also from the last twin peaks. It's about 20 seconds or something. Yeah, and the film Still is from Marvel and Drive, isn't it? So yeah, he's obviously been a constant source of interest for you. Absolutely, because it's a very painterly way of making film there. It's at David Lynch, as with Hitchcock, you have a sort of physical intelligence within the making of film, which I find very interesting, which you have also with Georges François with a film that I always refer to as Georges Alfisard from 1958. Or even, let's say, the lady from Shanghai, with this very awkward way of editing a film, let Orson Welles there. So there's this element of magic, which barely doesn't exist anymore in film. Yeah. And then it seems to me, you're also really interested in finding examples of film, which really activate the present moment. I'm thinking particularly of the shore, the 2014 painting, where you used on Chaffee's a Twister Sand, which is a not-so-well-known film, but it's amazing how it was a film that was very particularly related to a particular subject matter, but somehow you activated that in 2014 to represent something entirely different whilst also sort of in a way paying homage to this extraordinary sequence of that film. Yeah, that was basically the idea that there were some reminiscence of ISIS, so we had the white and the dark elements. Yeah. And then this idea of course that they get shot in the end, that just took this one part right before that actually happens in terms of the gaze out in this element of surrender. Then again, also with the other paintings that I made before, the arena paintings, this was a sort of prolongment of that, but the condensed into one specific image. And also the fact that I painted it differently, I just painted it the black and then actually with the clinics, I wiped out the figures and then filled them back in. So it was a completely different process of painting there. Wow, fascinating. Is there a particular discipline in your daily working life that you see as an essential ritual? Yes, the thing is when I start to paint, of course, I've used to drink a lot of hard liquor, which I for the last four years don't do anymore, but that was one of the rules to be sober, to work, especially the day that I'm working. And then the other ritual is that I probably need cigarettes to do. Right. A lot of people talk about cigarettes as a sort of meditative experience. Like through working, if you're painting and you have the cigarette, it gives you the kind of pause, if you like. Yes, it also transports you body somewhere else. There is a culture of smoking in every culture, as opposed to it has to do with an element of transcendence or not I don't know, but it is more difficult to get rid of it than heroin, I suppose. You mentioned about drinking there. I read that when you completed a painting, you'd go out and drink a lot and then come back to the painting when you were still feeling the effects of the alcohol to try and transport yourself into the mind of a viewer that isn't you. Yes. How do you do that now? If you don't have alcohol, how do you how do you do that? I can't. I just take my wife. It's my best critic. That's great. I think you may have answered this question, but if you could live with just one work of art, what would it be? Well, I tell you there could be the Arlofini's which are in the National Gallery. Yeah, it's a great painting. And lastly, what is art for? Well, art is especially the element where you can reconsider where there is a time frame in a zone where there is the opportunity and the liberty to without any moral sense to make an assessment of what time history and a specific sort of element of experience of life. It also is an element of hope to assert the next step. Luke, thank you so much. OK, thank you. Luke Thomas, the fruit basket is at David's Verna in New York until the 19th of December. It's then at David's Verna in Los Angeles from February of 2026. Luke Thomas works in the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in Italy around display until the 22nd of February 2026. And that's it for this episode. Do subscribe wherever you're listening and give us a rating or review on Apple podcasts. Please also subscribe to our sister podcast, The Week in Art, a deep dive into the latest big art world stories, the top shows and the key issues every week and subscribe to the art newspaper at theartnewspaper.com. We're on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Blue Sky and a reminder that my book What Is Art for, which is 25 of the conversations from the Abrush with series is out now and published by Henny. Production, editing and sound design on Abrush with by David Clack and the producers are Amy Dawson and Philip Akeli. Thanks also to our social editor, Kelly Foster and our designer Daniela Hathaway. A big thank you to Luke Taimans. Thank you for listening. See you next week for Abrush with Olafer Elias. Bye for now. Abrush with Isponsor by Bluebird Connects. Explore Bluebird Connects today and discover cultural institutions on demand.